There’s prolific, and then there’s Team Ninja. No sooner had I wrapped up an evening with the demo of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty – a demo that’s just gone live to all on PlayStation 5 – than the news broke of another in its long line of action games with Rise of the Ronin. And all this before I’ve even had the chance to finish the team’s take on Final Fantasy, Strangers of Paradise, or even managed to fully get my head around what exactly Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is.
There’s plenty that’s familiar in Wo Long, though, both from the Nioh games it builds upon – themselves a pair of hard-edged, deeply enjoyable spins on the action RPG template laid out by FromSoft’s Souls games – and Koei Tecmo’s broader history with the Three Kingdoms periods. Because, in the simplest terms possible, Wo Long is Nioh transposed to the mythology and legends of third century China.
It’s more than that, though, with an all-new approach to combat and an entirely different feel to it all. Nioh was a game of studied composure, and one that rewarded consideration in your attacks. Wo Long, on the other hand, flows like water and invites you to lose yourself in its combat, pulling you through its stages with a momentum quite unlike that which you’d associate with your typical Soulslike. It’s not quite a musou – that brand of crowd-clearing action that Koei Tecmo has made a craft of over the past 20 years – but it weaves in some ideas with its morale system that sees you conquering the map to earn more power. The end result is something that feels surprisingly novel.
