This review contains some spoilers, so please proceed with caution. Based on my own gaming evaluation system, the following comments and ratings are purely subjective.

Personal subjective rating after completing the first playthrough: 7.5/10

First, I apologize for the clickbait title. Ignoring the external controversies and discussions, I think Black Myth: Wukong is a decent AAA ARPG with notable shortcomings.

Many have praised the game’s strengths so I won’t dwell on them. Instead, I’ll focus on discussing the game’s flaws.

Performance

Firstly, the game has severe performance issues, particularly on the PS5 (Digital Foundry has done an in-depth analysis). At the start of the game, there is a lengthy shader compilation process. It’s important to note that this compilation must be redone after updating your GPU drivers. I completed my first playthrough on a PC with a 7800X3D and RTX 3090, and honestly, even in smaller areas (where there’s no need to use cutscenes to load sections), I experienced frequent frametime spikes (i.e., sudden minor stutters), which was very annoying. In areas requiring cutscene loading, the stuttering was even more severe. I suspect this might not be an isolated issue. Although there are still relatively few games made with UE 5, considering the performance of UE 4, this kind of frame time stuttering seems to be a common issue. However, the development team’s optimization efforts are clearly inadequate and require much more work.

Storyline

As for the storyline, setting aside the controversies over Black Myth’s alleged disrespect for the original work’s core spirit, I believe that as long as the adaptation is reasonable and self-consistent, it can be acceptable. However, the plot of Black Myth can be described as mediocre, with characters lacking substantial story development and sufficient motivation for their actions. I find it hard to understand how the development team put so much effort into the game’s monster compendium, crafting numerous deeply meaningful side stories, yet the main plot remains bland. The entire story can be summarized as the protagonist collecting the remnants of Sun Wukong and becoming the new Great Sage. Note that this mechanical reductionism conclusion is flawed. If the cost of fragmented storytelling is to weaken the narrative, I don’t think that’s a wise decision.

The characterization of the protagonist, The Destined One, is even weaker. By the end of the game, we still know very little about the protagonist. Of course, one could argue that this was done to allow players to self-insert themselves into the character, but I wouldn’t say I like this kind of protagonist. The protagonist is merely a tool the development team uses to advance their dull storyline. It could even be said that the portrayal of the companion, Zhu Bajie, who appears mid-game, is far more vivid than that of the protagonist.

Map Design

The map design has been widely criticized by many. The design has significant flaws due to overemphasis on artistic expression. Many have criticized the game’s invisible walls and the problem of getting lost due to a lack of visual guidance. However, I didn’t encounter enough situations in the game where getting lost seriously affected my experience. In fact, after a few hours of adapting to the invisible walls at the beginning of the game, I approached it as if it were a game from the last generation (only in terms of the map, considering the technical limitations of creating seamless exploration at the time). As an experienced gamer, I could roughly judge where I could go and where I couldn’t. But this doesn’t mean I think the map design problems are insignificant. The maps in Black Myth are too “natural,” meaning that visual guidance is forced to give way to artistic expression. The development team pursued an incredibly realistic visual effect, leading to a lack of sufficient differentiation in many parts of the map. This makes it difficult for less experienced players to determine where to go.

Combined with the placement of items and bosses, this results in a very poor exploration experience. The placement of many items could almost be considered random (I even think if a mod randomly generated item placements, it wouldn’t be much worse than the current situation, barring key items). If complete collection is not the goal, this kind of item collection experience is disastrous. The game’s combat process is primarily focused on the boss rush. Still, in some exploration scenarios (I say this because I found that in my second playthrough, after choosing a different exploration route in Chapter 2, the previously concentrated boss fight experience became more balanced), there are cases where the intervals between bosses are too long or too short. This disruption of the player’s expectations for boss battles can affect the player’s flow in some cases; though it’s not a major issue, some people might not like it.

Graphics

As a AAA game from the UE 5 generation, the graphics seem to be beyond criticism, but there are actually some significant issues. This part should probably be discussed in the performance section, but I didn’t bother adjusting the order. The game’s models are highly detailed thanks to UE 5’s Nanite technology, but the vegetation still seems to have been created using traditional techniques. I could very clearly see the texture popping of vegetation; even though I played with LOD set to cinematic, the LOD for vegetation still had issues, which was very immersion-breaking. If this problem could be solved, the game’s graphics could be considered the most realistic UE 5 game. But another, more severe problem is that the game has a lot of artifacts, especially temporal ones, which are particularly noticeable in particle effects. Similar issues can be observed with hair, character edges, and water surfaces, where much chaotic high-frequency information is visible. I’m unsure if this is noise or something else, but it makes these visuals very blurry.

Combat System

The combat system in the game can only be described as passable. Many of the boss designs in the game still don’t interact well with the player. I’m not talking about the difficulty of the bosses. I think most of the bosses in this game are relatively easy, but in some boss fights, players often find themselves unable to deal damage for extended periods. To a large extent, whether the player can effectively damage the boss depends on whether the boss’s AI is in a good enough mood to come within the player’s attack range (like Kang-Jin Loong). I know that certain strategies or playstyles can solve this problem, but the lack of an effective universal ranged attack option is an unavoidable issue in this game.

However, the bigger problem with the combat system actually lies with the protagonist. To some extent, the combat system design is relatively poor. The game’s three weapon stances don’t affect the normal attack move set, only the heavy attack, making the action move set feel relatively monotonous. There’s no blocking system in the game, only dodging, and the character’s performance in the ARPG genre is quite good, so it’s clear that the development team wants to encourage players to press the attack in boss fights. However, Black Myth’s combat system can be summarized as a resource management process. Heavy attacks require light attacks to build up, and light attacks consume stamina. You can see that the development team’s idea of encouraging players to press the attack (or maybe I guessed wrong) conflicts with the limitations of the combat system, making the combat experience very disjointed.

Conclusion

Finally, after discussing the shortcomings above, let’s revisit the aspects outside the game. I initially didn’t want to talk about these, but the article needs a complete ending. As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m setting aside the controversies and discussions outside the game because the conversation gets distorted once you bring up things outside the game. I don’t know when it started, but gamers have stopped simply discussing the game itself and begun to care more about things outside the game. Many people’s evaluations of the game have become polarized as if the only ratings are 0/10. As I said in the title, Black Myth is definitely over-hyped. It’s clear that most of the sales came from the Chinese market. I can understand that this might be due to the Halo Effect—Chinese players may have given Black Myth: Wukong a higher rating overall because of their love for the Journey to the West theme or their expectations for a domestic AAA game, even if their understanding and standards for AAA games are not very deep. Due to the Primacy Effect, for those players experiencing AAA games for the first time, Black Myth: Wukong was elevated to a pedestal by the public opinion whirlwind, giving them a solid initial positive impression, which may lead them to overestimate the overall quality of the game. But what worries me is that this kind of marketing might become the norm in the future. Perhaps this type of marketing wasn’t Game Science’s original intention, but once the market sees the advantages of doing this, what will everything become in the end? Who knows?