Recent reviews by Asulk

I didn’t really have Black Myth: Wukong on my radar, but it turned out to be an unexpected masterpiece for me. This is exactly what AAA games in 2024 should feel like.

The episodic, linear story follows 'Journey to the West', a mid-age roman that picks up on the topics of buddhism and chinese mythology. While the plot isn’t overly complex, it does a good job of drawing you into the world of the Monkey King. This also reflects in the playstyle, with the main weapon being the Monkey King's magical staff.

Gameplay is focused on boss fights, with combat that feels mostly satisfying and smooth. While not as in-depth as games like Elden Ring in terms of movement or weapon variety, the fights remain engaging. The game's pacing kept me hooked, even if it was very linear in terms of exploration.

The graphics are, without a doubt, one of the strongest aspects of BM:W. The game is visually breathtaking, with environments that are rich in detail and atmosphere. However, keep in mind that this level of detail comes at a cost—this game is GPU-heavy and might not run on older systems. As a quick tip here, the developer has published a benchmark tool for free which you can use to test your performance.

The soundtrack complements the atmosphere and is well-themed for the eastern mythology.

+ No Microtransactions: it delivers a complete experience with no in-game purchases or paywalls.
+ Smooth Combat: Fights feel fluid and responsive, even if the mechanics aren’t as complex as other soulslike titles. The game nails the feeling of weight behind each hit.
+ Beautiful Graphics: The visual design is stunning
+ Polished at Release: The game feels optimized and mostly polished. I encountered only minor bugs—like getting stuck in certain spots—but nothing game-breaking.

- localization: translation was incomplete / missing on release, but most of this seems to be fixed already
- 'invisible walls'; There are areas that look reachable but are out of bounds, resulting in running into invisible walls.
- I didnt like the heavy motion blur (I already set it to 'low'), that would sometimes generate artifacts on my screen

This game might not be for everyone though. It is not advertised as a soulslike, but that is a bit misleading. Yes, unlike in Sekiro or Elden Ring you do not have this heavy punishments for death (like losing your stuff). However, the boss difficulty is still high in this game and you will most likely die a lot. So there is some patience required.

Overall, if you love mythology, challenging combat, and stunning visuals, this is a journey you don’t want to miss though.

Upvote anytime because of pengu 🐧

- The light-mood music fits the overall game theme well. Altough I had to tune it down because some songs became a bit annoying for me over time.
- What I do believe has been stepped up slightly from the previous Dirt games are the car/engine sounds. They feel more crisp and not that echoing.

Bright colors, to add to the theming. Graphics are enjoyable with decent reflections, shadings and blooming effects.

Seems good. The game runs at a good frame rate on a midrange pc. I also didn't encounter any major bugs or game crashes so far (in heavy contrast to Forza lol).

- Drive is easy with high car stability which make this game a typical arcade racer. Even when taking the sharpest turns or jumps I would barely lose control over my car.
- The game gives decent haptic feedback for accelerating. It feels much more nuanced but also a bit weaker than the previous Dirt parts.

Cars show some visual damage when crashing heavily. But real car damage that will slow you down or lead to failure doesn't exist. Also, the Cars mostly keep stability even when touching.

- Buying the full-priced title won't unlock all content, because guess what - EA is involved in the game now and just introduced us to their glorious idea of micro transactions.
- 1 / 4 Campaigns is available in the base game and presents itself with mostly lapped races, sprints or some Gymkhana
- Online: It's only single casual races, that stuff gets boring fast
- Playground: Cool feature, you can build your own maps / game modes and be a bit creative here.
- Split screen: Something many racing games today won't offer anymore: You can play the game in a 4-player split screen mode.

- They drive very static and predictable, rarely changing their line. It is easy to block them when in front or outbrake them when behind. Speaking of that, there are no real punishments for unfair driving?
I feel like i should have gotten some penalties, but got away even with some more rude driving lol.
- Most of my races also went pretty similar, where the field splitted into two packs of cars after just some turns on the track. And 'pack' is very fitting here, as those cars do glue tightly behind each other most of the time then.

A bit of a culture shock for me as a long-time Dirt Rally player. While some of the past franchise games where more into the direction of a rally simulation, this one is for sure an arcade racing game.
Looks like the developers don't have the licensing by the FIA anymore, because they in turn have published their own rally game (WRC 10). Original rally tracks from some of the previous parts are therefore gone.
However the replacement comes with much variety. Sometimes it's literally a racing track, other times you will drive through the mountains.
Day time and weather conditions also change up quickly, often times even in a time span of just one or two laps.
Rain, ice, a sandstorm, or a just a sweet night drive, the game offers a lot here.

This is an arcade racing game priced above € 50 (+ DLCs). So, naturally, I would compare it to Forza Horizon since it falls into a similar category for most people.
Let's be honest though, that wouldn't be a real competition. Forza got superior graphics, beautiful audio, more content/cars, a larger community and waaay more opportunities to customize stuff.

For the steam-achievement hunters out there: keep in mind that you can only complete them by buying all extra DLCs. Because you need to finish the additional campaigns too and have to use some of the DLC cars.

TLDR
I could only recommend to buy if it would be less than half the price. For it's current price, the game is competing with titles like Forza - a category this game definitely can't reach.
Diehard rally fans also won't be satisfyied, so I believe there is unfortunately not much of a selling point for this game.

My expectations were decently high after Konami only pushed out a season update in 2020 and explained they would fully concentrate on the 2021 version. Especially the engine-update (to Unreal Engine) should be bringing some new breath to the game.
In addition, the game should become free2play, which in my opinion is the only way nowadays to fight the fully commercialized FIFA franchise. However, as much as I like that to get some new players into the game, there wasn't much marketing / public statement by Konami about it. Or the future of the game as a whole (new branding etc). But we do see the results now anyways.

Playability
Where are the game modes? Not many options here at the moment. Quick play is the only way to go, and even that feels bad;
There is not much variation in arenas, casters and weather conditions. With the current content available it plays like a demo and not a full game.
And obviously, let's not even start the licensing discussion, we know FIFA got them all...
But hey, at least cross play is promised 😁

Graphics
- Idk, the camera man must be drunken, it randomly zooms in and out all the time. That's very annoying and interrupting the game flow.
- Player models didn't get too much love, some of them look very polygonal. Eyes and mouth of some players look truly horrendous, making extremely weird and unrealistic expressions.
And let's not talk about some of the graphical bugs you will encounter. Just looking into the community hub for a minute might make you laugh.
- Resolution settings are bugged and automatically go to lower resolutions. Especially if you use two screens.
- Players are a bit pixelated in standard cam
- crowd repeatedly using the same character models is off-putting
- Player jerseys, especially their preview (pre-game) look cool tho


User Interface
The menu is too colorful and for me, it feels like a typical mobile game UI that targets 12 year olds...
It is not well designed, a lot of elements are at the wrong place and/or size. I wonder if they even have UX testers, because this should be an obvious thing.
Ingame:
- the scoreboard is very distracting / too big and bright
- don't know how to feel about that weird player cursor


Gameplay / Engine
- Ball physics don't feel right. The ball feels static, heavy.
- Overall responsiveness isn't good. I always had some input lags or feel of control loss.
- Defending sometimes just won't work / respond. Unlucky I guess.
- Passing system is ok-ish, was always PES strength, but not much improvement here. It is difficult though.
- Is crossing even possible? Mine almost always fail, sometimes the ball just awkwardly flips around.
- Game speed is incredibly slow. That might be realistic, but I honestly don't want to scale up the minutes per game just because I don't want every game to end in a 0:0.
- Because of the slow speed, there are not a lot of fast counter attacks
- You will regularly run out of bounds, even if you stop movement several meters before
Overall, the game currently just feels clunky as hell.
- Scoring doesn't give a feeling of accomplishment like 'ye I exactly wanted that' because of the lacking controls - even with the better players.


AI
- player movement isn't good so far, AI often times reacts completely wrong / unrealistic. Players have no momentum and seem to just stop sometimes instead of sliding into some dynamic movement.
- AI is very static and won't run or even sprint a lot
- Not many settings available to adjust the AI behavior

Esport
- no training mode to test different strategies, tactics, tricks etc.
- Let me double the critical players like Ronaldo or Messi...
- Not a lot of offensive options when the opponent just keeps the ball within his defense and plays down the minutes
- Spectating is a horrible experience at the moment because of the game's clunkyness
- Lack of team/tactics/environment doesn't scream competitiveness at all.


TL;DR:
If you look at the game as it is in its current state, it seems like Konami has given up the PES franchise and won't invest a lot into it for the foreseeable future.
The game truly feels like a mobile game, maybe that's their only relevant target audience now, at least the PC version is definitely not that enjoyable.
As it turns out, mobile and next gen in one game won't work well.

We can only hope some quick updates might fix stuff, but there is definitely a lot of work to do.

The game has a horrible interface where you'll need some time to find your stuff. Totally outdated in regards of design aspects. Same with the launcher. I've seen games using such a launcher seven or eight years ago.

Graphics are ok, could be better but also worse for 2018. However for a competitive shooter still better than CS (lol).

Matchmaking is slightly broken at the moment, but that might also be the result of how many players the game currently has. Especially a problem in the competitive mode since even less ppl play that.

Regarding gameplay, the Unreal Engine is a nice thing to have. Still, I had these moments in the game where I thought "how is it even possible to get hit by that?". Just those weird situations which don't make sense.

Physics are comparable to COD since you'll often times just spray and pray in closer fights. That also means that even in the Demolition game mode (bomb defusing) games become less tactical compared to CS.

F2P concept behind the game is that you'll need some time to unlock all the weapons, you'll only have a couple of them when starting.

As far as I have seen it, the game is absolutely not P2W because you'll get access to the good weapons (but grinding is part of it). Also, character models etc dont give any additional ingame boosts that might favor players who bought them.

To sum it up this shooter is surely not for everyone but it's free and still in development, so you might try it and then personally decide whether or not you like it.