Black Myth Wukong

The God of War comparison is probably the most spot on, though faster paced (twitchier even) with a big of Ghosts of Tsushima style stance manipulation tossed in. Game is beautiful and runs really well on my PS5 (caveat: I have a high performance SSD drive installed on it that helps) and the combat is fairly fun.

But... it suffers from some Bloodbornisms. Specifically, in the boss fights, a lot of the combat is highly twitch based requiring split second reads to dodge. And it feels like you are battling the RNG to get the win on some of the harder bosses (I am going up the Black Wind mountain shit atm) early on. My other main gripe is the camera being the biggest enemy, along with the tendency for some bosses to randomly become invisible/untargetable during a fight. The first Black Wind King fight is a perfect example of this, with him just ignoring the immobilize power at random points and turning invisible and zipping around the arena. Pretty much every boss battle to the point I am at seems to be two freezes, one transform, spam dodge, and pray to the RNG gods. Its not frustrating, outside of the camera bullshit, but it lacks the depth of a FROM game or GoW.

Having said all that, this is still an excellent game if you have the reflexes for it. Playing it in HDR on my giant TV with my surround cranked is a near movie like experience and the story is well executed without getting in the way of the game. And exploring the overland maps to hunt down items and clear trash is really cathartic. I am hoping the variety picks up a bit as I progress, but I am really digging it despite this not being my normal type of game.