The public demo of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty gave players a chance to get a more general idea of what this fast-paced action game offers, but Koei Tecmo recently gave us the chance to dig deeper and play through the first two chapters of Wo Long in full. I’m beginning to understand that development team Ninja is targeting a broader group of gamers with Wo Long, as opposed to their Nioh titles, which are some of the most demanding in games. While Wo Long still offers that From Software-inspired challenge, it also features a unique system that lets you change an enemy’s difficulty in real-time, making them much more approachable.
At the heart of Wo Long is its unique morale system, which increases as you defeat enemies and decreases as you take damage. Take enough damage and you can lose a full rank. You restore your morale by defeating the enemy that knocked you out, which feels like collecting souls after death in Dark Souls, and I love the implementation here.
In chapter two, a mini-boss with a morale rank of 20 killed me while my morale was 17. The higher an enemy’s morale, the harder they are to defeat, but defeating enemies in the immediate area can often lower an enemy’s rank. And even though I started this section at morale rank 13, I got back to 17 by defeating every enemy on the way to the mini-boss. What’s interesting here is the push and pull between the urge to rush to that lower ranked mini-boss to salvage the morale and experience I’ve lost, and the desire to take it slow to build my morale by defeating enemies defeat along the way, and challenge the boss with higher morale. In doing so, however, I risk falling victim to one of the dozen enemies along the way. I like being able to decide how important my experience and morale were, and I particularly enjoy that I can increase my combat power by increasing my morale.
This system feels like built-in difficulty scaling. If I crave more challenge, I can face a boss with a higher morale rank. If I’m having trouble defeating him, I can farm smaller enemies and build my morale to match the boss’s.
The morale system is the highlight of Wo Long so far. It adds a unique new element to the challenging action genre popularized by the Dark Souls series. As From Software continues to perfect this formula, I love it when developers put their own spin on it, and that’s exactly what Team Ninja is doing again with Wo Long.
But that’s not the only aspect of Wo Long that impressed me; His combat is slick, fast-paced, and stressful, even when he’s up against regular mob enemies (which you can take down with ease if you just miss a parry, block, or dodge). It’s the first game since From Software’s Sekiro that gives me the same thrill of parrying and dodging, and I don’t think I have more praise for Wo Long.
The action is paramount, but something surprising about Wo Long is its characters and story. Gone are the obscure “it’s there when you look for it” narrative aspects typically found in this genre. Instead, Wo Long presents its story with hype-inducing cutscenes, characters with striking personalities, and storytelling that seems to get to me rather than me. Perhaps this is the result of playing through the game’s opening, but I hope Wo Long continues to unfold his narrative the way it did in those first two installments. Luckily I don’t have to wait much longer to find out.
This article was previously published on Source link
