Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Review (PS5)
The demands for fewer Souls-likes in the gaming release calendar make quite a lot of sense when they’re as formulaic and familiar as Wuchang: Fallen Feathers.
From developer Leenzee, the debut effort is a mostly competent attempt at a Dark Souls experience, but it doesn’t do nearly enough to stand out from its many, many peers. Besides its Chinese aesthetics and setting, you could imagine the game in your sleep and you’d be most of the way there — it’s just that derivative.
Mazy level design guides you through jungles and temples, battling increasingly difficult enemies and bosses, all while upgrading your own stats, gear, and weapons. There’s a surprising amount of NPCs to talk to offering quests, and a compass provides better guidance than what’s typical of the genre, but by and large, you’ve seen it all multiple times over already.
The twist is, though, that while Wuchang: Fallen Feathers feels overly familiar, the Souls-like trappings it subscribes to almost always produce a decent experience. It’s no different here, as a combat system based on dodging makes fights fast and engaging. Then, with a unique Madness mechanic, you can transform your customisable protagonist to unlock new abilities and increase your damage. It’s neat, and one of the few things the title has going for it when compared to any other Souls-like.
Again, it’s an entirely adequate experience that proves fun enough in the moment but not particularly memorable a few days removed from a playthrough.
It’s the technical performance that lets Wuchang: Fallen Feathers down the most, however, at least at launch. You can pick between Quality, Balanced, and Performance modes on PS5 Pro, but on top of them, you can unlock the frame rate, turn motion blur on and off, and adjust the depth of field between low, medium, and high.
A PC-lite offering on paper, in practice, it actually gives you the rather unique opportunity to choose what technical flaw the game will suffer from. In testing, we struggled to find an acceptable combination of settings, with some introducing absurd screen tearing, incredibly blurry graphics, and low-quality environments.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is enjoyable enough without its performance troubles, but with them, they’re a major drag on the overall game. Wait for them to be ironed out in post-launch patches and you’ll find a decent, if formulaic experience.
