Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Review – Almost incredible

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is the latest famous soul-like game from Chinese developer Leenzee. Unlike some of the latest Soul-like releases, Ushan is more faithful to the Demon Souls of FromSoftware and the formula created by Dark Souls, but the changes it makes may be the downfall of the game.

Woochan It’s like an ambitious soul and helps to highlight it being one of the latest and most popular subgenres around. What prevents that from being great is that all these new systems are a hassle to really understand and use. I’m sure that if players have a full understanding of the balance of the system, they can create characters with amazing features, but it’s difficult to reach the sweet spot they play throughout the game.

To keep you out of the way, Ushan’s story is like a game like many souls. You play as the honorable Bai Wuchan, a pirate warrior suffering from amnesia who has to fight various regions of ancient China during the Ming Dynasty. People are victims of “feathers” and are the diseases of the game that create infected bud feathers and eventually turn into monsters. Ushan can harness the power of her feathers to become the ideal warrior who reveals what’s going on.

Is this a confused and vague storyline? Yes, because it’s like a soul, and that’s essentially a requirement. The people you meet will vaguely talk about other people and subjects that don’t make sense until you connect them together with the description of the item, the clues found throughout the realm, and elements of the environmental story. It’s not a fully graspable storyline with a casual playthrough, so we rely on YouTube lore to piece together the story in the days and weeks after the game’s release.

Too much progression system progresses

What’s important for Wuchang is something like souls that aims to stand out in the subgenre, it’s gameplay and certainly unique. It’s dynamic, but mostly flawed, and many complexities hinder the flow of combat.

As a Wuchang, you can access five classes of weapons. It deals a lot of damage but is slow. A longsword that deals good damage while allowing parry. Twin swords that allow for quick attacks at the expense of reduced damage. A one-handed sword in midrange for damage and speed. A spear that can thrust at longer distances, but deals strong damage.

Throughout the game, you will encounter a variety of weapons of each type. There is a total of 25, and they all have unique appearances, abilities and statistics from each other. So you are not overwhelmed with Eldenling, for example, where you can choose more than 300 weapons.

However, to get the most out of these weapons, you will need to work through the skill tree. This tree represents a hurdle in the game as it makes things overly complicated.

The Skill Tree reminds me of the sphere grid from Final Fantasy X. It is divided into six passes. One is divided into each weapon, one is divided into generic use with regular upgrades so that you can add it to your healing flask, deal more damage with certain effects and earn more magic points. There are also various statistical improvements along each path, including adding additional points to strength, endurance, agility, and more.

Earn enough red mercury, game soul, and currency, and you can earn levels and provide a red essence that unleashes spots in the grid. Improved attacks and mastery of weapons also require you to go down each path, so you will need to go down these paths to power up your martial arts and weapons. Then, at a certain point in time that unlocks more spots on the grid, the path is expanded to give you more statistics, abilities, etc.

If you’re confused after reading this, you’ll be confused if you try it yourself. Leveling up your character and entering points into different stats is one thing, but recognizing that you need to level up and unlock the path to get more healing flasks is another thing.

The leveling system ruins you when you don’t release the specific paths your boss needs. The boss in particular was kicking my ass. Because it is the first boss you need to use bias or parasitics to defeat (unless you’re a soul-like ace that you can play perfectly). I was down the Axe Upgrade Path and didn’t realize I wasn’t equipped for the fight. You will receive a hint message referring to Deflect, but this was the first time the game has mentioned this feature. After failing to beat this boss for hours, I decided to look at the grid longer and found that its deflection ability was some upgrades to the longsword path.

Luckily, you can respect these points at the shrine for free. Careful, I might have beaten the boss in reverse – play completely – but it was much easier to deflect and assume to expose the boss’s weakness. And prior to this, the boss hadn’t given me any major trouble.

This upgrade grid is very interesting, but there are so many abilities and benefits that you need to unlock from the start to reduce frustration when playing.

Madness is driving me crazy

Another interesting idea for Ushan is the insan system. This is a play of humanity and kindling found in the original Souls game, with a bit of insight from Bloodborne. When you die or defeat a particular enemy, your madness increases. As your madness increases, you can become more powerful. On that path, we mentioned gaining more healing flasks, but it has unlockable properties. Here, if you have some degree of insanity, you will deal more damage or gain extra abilities.

Madness is based on your level, so the higher the level, the more maximum madness you get. If your madness is low, you can also get a certain amount of madness to buy items at the shrine.

So what happens when your madness is at Max? Well, that’s bad for two reasons. The first is to deal more damage, but it takes more damage. This will be great for players like hardcore souls with perfect Dodge and Parry timing. I’m sure SpeedRunners will take advantage of this characteristic. But when you’re being kicked in your ass by the boss, the last thing you want is for them to hit you for more damage.

Undoubtedly, the most interesting part of this crazy system is that where you died or died nearby, the place where you have some of the red mercury you left behind takes the form of an evil doppelganger you have to fight. Defeating it will help you get items and get rid of all the madness.

It’s an interesting feature, but it’s also painful. To get rid of insanity, you can kill certain humanoid enemies, but sometimes to kill those people, you need to kill non-humanoid enemies that increase insanity. Alternatively, you can find and buy items that reduce madness in certain temples, but they are not widely available.

It’s the boss’s problem that really causes problems. If you die repeatedly at the boss and the place of death is in the boss’ arena, the doppelganger will not appear. So, unless you kill him elsewhere and decide to take down the doppelganger and return to Zero Madness, you’ll stick to Max’s insanity.

It’s pretty but punished

Wuchang plays just like games like Souls when it comes to action and graphics. Speed of gameplay is one step in Sekiro. From Software’s Parrying-Stenve Soulslike, Shadows not only dies twice, but is also on top of the other popular title, Bloodborne. It’s fast paced, but dynamic.

I say it’s dynamic because of the Spirit Points system, the game’s mana version. Unlike most Souls games, you cannot pull out a mana pool when casting magic or making special attacks. Instead, you need to earn Spirit Points. The easiest way to do this is to avoid it. Fully timed Dodge nets points where you can use one special ability or one basic spell. The grid has spots that unlock more points, and ways to get points from attack deflection, execution of a particular combo, or a certain amount of insanity.

This system does not allow someone to immediately create a glass cannon magic character from a bat fighting far away, as it requires players to become more active in battles, but I’m sure there are builds that can be done in the second half of the game. You really need to get there and mix it with the enemy.

After that, when the visuals come, Wuchang has some good looking scenes. The bosses in the game are unique in both attack and visuals and are highly praised by players like Souls.

The entire game presentation is comparable to any of the AAA titles. The English voice acting is a bit weak, but it’s virtually unimportant as people don’t talk much in the game.

I played the game on the standard PS5, but sometimes it seemed like the PS5 had some issues with dropping frames. That happened after some play, but not because I went to too many screens.

Wuchan is working hard on Leansee. The game doesn’t revolutionize genres like Souls, but it does the best thing next by providing ideas that they, or another developer, can refine. Maybe it will become a mainstay of the game genre of the future. If anything, I think the Wuchang sequel could be an incredible game if it happened. But for now, the formula is not there yet.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers will be available for $50 on PC, PS5 and Xbox series consoles on July 23rd. It will be available at Xbox Game Pass Day 1.