Wuchang: Fallen Feathers review

Wuchang brings some fun ideas to soulslike boss fights, but the rest of it is a pale imitation of much better games.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has almost nothing to add to the soulslike genre. For all of its 40-something hours of monster battles and weirdo NPCs, all it does is poorly imitate the best moments in FromSoftware‘s list of much better action games.

Skimpy outfits, dull combat, and an empty world cheapen the entire experience and bury the few things it actually does well. What’s left is a game that constantly reminded me of all the ways FromSoft has done it better and most of the time I wished I was just playing the real thing.

I’d cut Wuchang some slack if it hadn’t been 10 years since Bloodborne was released. There are countless soulslikes where some kind of monstrous plague has broken out in a town and a silent hero must fight their way to the source.

In Wuchang, the people of China aren’t turning into werewolves, they’re turning into birds. First they go blind and lose their memories and then they turn into tortured avian creatures with boss health bars. Your character, Wuchang, has it too, but most of her symptoms just give her awesome combat techniques.

The only thing she actually suffers from is gradually losing her mind and memory as you play, which occasionally forces you to fight a demon version of her to get your stuff back. Otherwise, Wuchang seems to be doing fine. So fine that her body remains perfectly doll-like to dress up in clothes that have absolutely nothing to do with the game’s gruesome version of China during the Ming dynasty.

A lot of the gear you can wear barely covers her up and looks like it came from a premium cosmetics shop—which it will have on launch (it wasn’t available in my pre-release copy). The game is so unserious about this that the best armor for resisting a lethal status affliction had me running around in my underwear.

It’s hard to feel the gravity of the situation as I wade through pools of blood and listen to the cries of people who have lost their friends and family to a horrifying disease when I’m playing a character designed to be eye candy. Part of what’s so compelling about FromSoft games is the imaginative ways they blend horror and humor in their worlds, like wearing a ridiculous mushroom outfit that gives you immunity to scarlet rot in Elden Ring. As absurd as some of the things in its games are, all of them are rooted in its fiction. Wuchang’s world doesn’t feel as deeply considered.

Weapon mastery

Wuchang brings one admittedly clever idea to the weighty, punishing combat you expect from a soulslike. Narrowly dodging enemy swings or landing repeated hits lets you weave in powerful spells and unique attacks without having to worry about draining a mana bar. Every weapon can make use of these special reactions based on how you invest your points in Wuchang’s Path of Exile-sized skill tree. It’s full of minor stat upgrades to health and damage and major nodes that give you unique moves that often grant you special attack charges.

I invested in one-handed swords so they passively fed me charges to use magic way more than you usually can in a FromSoft game. Dashing toward an enemy to land a few strikes and dashing back out to shower them in explosive stars spoiled me on how slick Wuchang could be during extended duels.

A boss fight against another swordswoman played like a dance as we clashed steel in the flooded ruins of a temple. After a flurry of slashes, she’d slam her foot down into the water, splashing the screen just as I dodged backward, Wuchang’s feathered arm igniting with a purple glow before I let off another volley of magic.

In those moments, Wuchang offers tense, Sekiro-like encounters that reward you for carefully considering your path through its massive skill tree. Every point increases your overall strength and incentivizes you to squeeze in specific attacks that lead to even stronger attacks. It gives extended fights a satisfying loop that also knocks you out of playing the safest way possible.

Been there

Outside of the boss fights, however, Wuchang’s combat drags. There’s only so many times I can kill the same hunched-over man and his crawling skeleton sidekicks before I fall asleep. Most of the encounters are built like speed bumps on the road to the next boss, and even when they do require a little thought, they’re tricks stolen right out of FromSoft games.

A few hours into Wuchang I was tiptoing across wooden planks in a poison-filled area that might as well be Dark Souls’ Blighttown. Soon after, I was sprinting past monsters to track down the necromancer who was endlessly summoning them—a nuisance I dealt with in plenty of FromSoft games. And somehow the designers of Wuchang thought fighting through an area where a lethal status effect constantly builds up on you would be fun despite it being the worst part of Bloodborne.

You’d think borrowing from some of the greatest action RPGs of all time would be a good idea, but most of them don’t work in a game like Wuchang. Unlike FromSoft games, Wuchang’s intensely dark tone doesn’t leave room for goofy deaths that feel like the designers pranking you. Enemies don’t kick you off of ladders or knock you off of cliffs. Random deaths feel incidental and frustrating when there’s no indication that you should be doing anything but charging through to the next boss.

The game makes it a point to lead you back around to places you’ve been before—a highly-praised aspect of the original Dark Souls—but other than a few NPC side quests, there’s really no reason to backtrack. By the end of my time with Wuchang, the nonstop references to better games had me questioning why I was even playing it in the first place.

Dull blade

Everything else in Wuchang isn’t any better. When you’re not fighting a single tough enemy, combat turns into a weightless spam-fest where you try to kill the monster before it hits you too many times. There’s no carefully trading blows and waiting for openings when every enemy stands there and lets you hit them until they don’t.

The extreme lack of variety in the encounter design and the enemies themselves dulls 90% of the game. The sections in between boss fights were so empty that it almost felt I was playing a game from a different team.

It doesn’t help that I spent a lot of time in Wuchang completely lost in its maze of dirt paths and ladders. Pacing around each level looking for stragglers who might lead you to the next place you need to go is a chore, especially when it all has a kind bland hyper-realistic sheen to it. A sunset peeking through dead trees as you enter a new area is pretty to look at for a few seconds, but I’m not sure what it’s doing in the same area you pass by heaping piles of skulls and rotten meat.

Without something tying these two wildly different visuals together, Wuchang begins to look like a confused Unreal Engine tech demo, not a distinct world made to communicate something core to its identity.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers

Wuchang brings some fun ideas to soulslike boss fights, but the rest of it is a pale imitation of much better games.

Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he’s driven to cover all sorts of games whether they’re broken, beautiful, or bizarre.

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