A great action game with fantastic combat, exciting bosses and lots of bugs.

I’ve never been so impressed, yet simultaneously so incredibly frustrated, by a game as I was with Black Myth: Wukong. This is, without a doubt, one of the most ambitious and impressive action games I’ve ever played. It’s stunningly beautiful; its combat is fantastic; it’s incredibly challenging yet always satisfying to overcome; and the setting is refreshingly unique and steeped in rich Chinese culture, just to sing some of its praises. Despite all of this, it often feels like it’s barely holding it all together. I suffered countless crashes on PC (the PlayStation 5 version was not available for this review) despite having a top-of-the-line setup with a GeForce RTX 4090, not to mention the multiple times I fell to the ground and died just as I was about to defeat a particularly difficult boss, or the way characters would randomly switch from English to Chinese, or the way dialogue audio would cut out and leave me completely in the dark during a key cutscene. It's a rickety rollercoaster, to be sure, and there were definitely points during the ride where I wasn't having the time of my life, but as a whole, this is an adventure where the bumps are worth it.

Black Myth: The Story of Wukong is a sort of sequel to Wu Cheng'en's classic novel Journey to the West, a book I'm only personally familiar with thanks to very loose adaptations like Dragon Ball and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West . That superficial familiarity didn’t help matters much, as the interpretation that the developers at GameScience have created here is filled with references to characters and events from the novel, without doing a great job of bringing you up to speed on who Sun Wukong is or what he encountered on his titular journey. I had to look online to understand who Zhu Bhajie was, what his history with Wukong was, and what the significance of certain encounters was, because otherwise I would have been completely lost at times.