Journey to the West is arguably one of China’s most influential pieces of literature and has had a tremendous impact on much of the media we love today. (We wouldn’t have Dragon Ball without it, for example.) Developer Game Science has set out to create an expansive action RPG that draws directly from the fantastic elements of the novel to bring Sun Wukong’s world to life. Black Myth: Wukong ($59.99) is the result: a familiar, yet also pleasantly unique action RPG for PC and PS5, full of charm, spirituality, and plain weirdness. Beat supernatural creatures with your trusty staff, or transform into them to give yourself an edge in combat. Minor balance issues and performance hiccups aside, Black Myth: Wukong is a fine action game packed with content that deserves your attention.
(Credit: Game Science/PCMag)
World of Wukong
Black Myth: Wukong is a world of men and monsters, packed with religious symbolism with a supernatural spin. You take up the mantle of the Destined One, a skilled warrior monkey, and venture into the marvelous and dangerous world of Chinese legend. The religious and spiritual elements of the story’s roots permeate the game’s environments and architecture, while the mythology inspires the enemy design. Yaoguai, sentient monsters, haunt every corner of the world and constantly get in your way.
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The game is broken into multiple chapters, each of which drops you off in a different setting with unique enemy encounters. These range from lush forests, to arid deserts, to snowy mountaintops. But even within each zone you have a good amount of variety. The first area in the game is set within a forested mountain and features an assortment of caverns, temples, and ruins. Every area you visit has a clear entrance and exit, but the areas themselves are sizable, with numerous enemy encounters you can engage with or avoid, and plenty of treasures to find. It feels similar in scope and size to the many maps in Dark Souls III.
You save and rest at shrines scattered throughout each zone. You can also teleport to these shrines once you’ve rested at them, making traveling fairly snappy. This is especially important because Black Myth: Wukong hides plenty of secrets to encourage thorough exploration and even backtracking throughout the zone, which makes simple wandering feel especially rewarding.
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(Credit: Game Science/PCMag)
Simple and Effective Melee Combat
You spend just as much time fighting as you do exploring. Fortunately, the fundamentals of combat are easy to grasp. You have a basic light attack string, a singular heavy attack, and a dodge command. However, Black Myth: Wukong adds subtle complexities to make the combat much more engaging and interesting than it seems at first glance. Heavy attacks are powerful single strikes that take a long time to charge. You can speed this charge by building focus points, which you earn by performing light attacks. Different stances change the heavy attack you perform, from overhead smash to long-range thrust.
As a result, melee combat revolves around these two systems. You build focus with light attacks and burn that focus to unleash heavy attacks. Learning when to unleash a heavy attack and when to dodge gives the game a strategic element that, while simple, is quite satisfying in execution. This is especially true as you advance through the game and bosses start getting much more aggressive. Bopping a boss out of its attack with a well-timed heavy blow never gets old.
Your character, the Destined One, doesn’t have a conventional block ability. You cannot parry your opponent’s strikes like you can in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Stellar Blade. The crux of your defense is your lithe evasion, which you can use to snake under virtually any attack the enemy throws at you. Evasion is snappy and responsive; it feels very similar to the aggressive dodging system in Final Fantasy XVI. The Destined One doesn’t need a block, and the gameplay is designed around his elusiveness instead.In a few instances, a hitbox felt unfairly large or lingered longer than you would expect, but Black Myth: Wukong feels fair and well-balanced in most combat situations.
That said, you do have other defensive tricks up your sleeve. You can deflect projectiles (and only projectiles) with a staff-twirling technique, which also serves as a close-range multi-strike attack. You also unlock a stone skin ability early in the game, which you can use to block and interrupt incoming attacks at the cost of some mana. This usually creates a big opening for you to counterattack. But for the most part, the fundamentals of the action remain the same: light attack, heavy attack, and dodge.
(Credit: Game Science/PCMag)
Monkey Around With Magic
If you’re at all familiar with Journey to the West, you know that the story has a dizzying assortment of supernatural elements. The Destined One earns many of these as abilities of his own, represented as Black Myth: Wukong’s many spells and transformations. For example, you can collect the spirits of fallen yaoguai and transform into them in battle to perform an attack, similar to Nioh 2’s Yokai Shift mechanic. These yaoguai even offer stat perks, like improved stamina regeneration or enhanced critical damage when equipped.
You also unlock a plethora of spells as you make progress. You can only equip four spells at a time, and you can swap between them at any shrine where you rest. The first spell you earn is the time-stop ability, which freezes enemies and bosses in place for a few seconds. You also get full transformation spells, which differ from the spirit versions in that you can fight as a particular yaoguai for a limited amount of time. These have unique movesets and a separate health bar, giving the melee combat appreciable variety.
Vessels are yet another ability you can use in combat, which gives you a temporary buff. The first one you encounter, the fireproof mantle, provides you with burn immunity and fire resistance, making it a great tool to use during the game’s first major boss, for example. All of these abilities, as well as your fundamental melee skills, can be further augmented via a comprehensive enhancement system from the menu. You can assign points you earn from fighting enemies to strengthen your favorite abilities by reducing cooldowns, increasing power, improving focus regeneration, and so on. You can even re-specialize at shrines if you want to invest in different abilities, which is quite handy.
I thoroughly enjoyed having an encyclopedic list of spells at any given time. These provide a significant edge in combat, giving you the distinct feeling that the game is letting you cheat a little with how much you have at your disposal. That said, my biggest gripe is that not only do many of your special abilities and spells have a cooldown, but they also consume mana. Having one system, be that cooldown or mana, limits the abuse of said ability, but having both makes the combat feel needlessly restrictive. For example, the stone skin spell lets you deflect incoming attacks with good timing. However, this spell has a 15-second cooldown by default, so you cannot use it liberally. With a mana restriction on top of that, there is a hard limit on how many times you can even use the spell in a given encounter, which is a little frustrating.
(Credit: Game Science/PCMag)
Can Your PC Run Black Myth: Wukong?
As an Unreal Engine 5 game, Black Myth: Wukong makes heavy use of AI upscaling via either DLSS, FSR, or TSR to squeeze the best possible performance out of your gaming rig. Our test PC, outfitted with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor, Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU, and 16GB of RAM, seemed to handle the game quite well, at first. We enjoyed the game at 1440p with over 70fps, and only occasional hitching and drops into 50fps. However, I suspect there may be a memory leak issue, as playing for an extended amount of time would tank performance no matter what settings I adjusted, even at the lowest graphical values available. The problem would correct itself after a restart.
Aside from technical issues, there are a handful of bugs worth mentioning. Sometimes text will appear in Chinese rather than English. For example, when crafting a permanent stat boosting item, I lacked the necessary ingredients and was given a warning in Chinese. There were a few instances where spoken dialogue switched to Chinese, and audio did cut out in rare instances as well. We hope these kinks are cleared up before launch or soon thereafter.
Black Myth: Wukong is not yet Steam Deck verified or playable, but we’ll update when more information becomes available.
Why You Should Game on a PC
Verdict: A Fantasy Worth Exploring
Tackling a reimagining of Journey to the West is a daunting task, but developer Game Science has delivered a great game framed around this iconic novel. Black Myth: Wukong honors the mysticism and fantasy of the story, while also delivering a tightly bundled action-RPG package featuring cleverly designed systems and mechanics. It’s fun to play, and the world is a joy to explore. Look past the restrictive cooldown system and the odd performance hiccups, and Black Myth: Wukong is a great game that is well worth checking out.
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Black Myth: Wukong
4.0
Editors' Choice
See It $59.99 at Steam
MSRP $59.99
Pros
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Simple but highly satisfying melee combat
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Robust magic systems offer great action variety
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Weird and wonderful setting
Cons
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Frustrating mana and cooldown systems
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Minor performance issues and bugs
The Bottom Line
Black Myth: Wukong draws from the iconic Sun Wukong mythos to deliver an action RPG packed with satisfying action and dizzying magical variety, set in a delightful world.
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My career has taken me through an eclectic assortment of fields, and connected me with people from all walks of life. This experience includes construction, professional cooking, podcasting, and, of course, writing. I’ve been typing up geeky takes since 2009, ultimately landing a freelancing position at PCMag. This blossomed into a full-time tech analyst position in 2021, where I lend my personal insight on the matters of web hosting, streaming music, mobile apps, and video games.
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