Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - Review - Nioh & Sekiro had a Beautiful Baby

what is happening y'all Cowboy here and welcome to my review of whoa long Fallen Dynasty the latest Souls like everyone has been curious about and in today's video we're going to be talking about areas that it excels areas where I feel it fell a little bit short in my overall opinion of the game of course a big thanks to the folks at koi Tecmo for review code just in an effort to help minimize spoilers we're going to be staying in the second level of the game for the majority of this review this is the same level that you've all had a chance to play yourselves in the demo version of the game if I do go anywhere else that could be spoilery will of course give you ample warning beforehand but either way let's talk about the game uh so I've been saying pretty much since the launch of this that if you were to think of Neo as team Ninja's version of Dark Souls this is very much their version of sekiro and I think that does hold true but the game still has a lot of neo-dna alive and well in it especially when you consider kind of the pace and the speed that we've come to love combat for Neo that is very much alive and well long and part of the thing that draws you into Neo is just that that fast-paced combat that of course is very alive and well in this game even more so and probably the the biggest emphasis that we see in Psych Hero's influence is gonna be in the deflect mechanic that is the core of the gameplay in this game now to briefly talk about the deflect and how it works because it quite literally the basis of this game we have a bar that you can see right below my health bar and that is going to be my spirit now as I successfully attack enemies like this you can see the spirit bars filling up with blue and that's considered positive spirit and I can use this to either use martial arts abilities I can use it to cast Wizardry spells alternatively I can do a spirit or a heavy attack and that will spend all the spirit I've accumulated to amplify the damage of that particular attack now that it's very much a tug of war type system because playing well builds up your spirit and then you can use that spirit spend it on actions now obviously I can also continue to attack and as you can see we're going into negative Spirit right now by continuing to do this and now it's not necessarily A Bad Thing unless I get hit because getting hit with negative experience it would win my character and knock them down and then I wouldn't be able to counter an attack from an enemy so it's it's a little bit of a tug of war system like I said where you're building up your spirit and then you're spending it but this allows you to do some really interesting stuff you could effectively constantly use martial arts as long as you have a high enough level you could constantly use your Wizardry spells and so you have a combat that is not only very fast paced and very kind of familiar for those that have played the Neo franchise but it really rewards smart play and and effective play now at the same time I do think a lot of secular DNA is alive in this game specifically in terms of like sneaking around and getting death blows um well critical blows is what they're called in this game but we have constant opportunities where we're either going to plunge enemies and take them on out or come up enemies from behind and being a little bit slower is extremely effective in this game there's even builds that that promote this play style leveling the water stat for example will increase the stealth in terms of how fast you can approach characters and take them on out a huge part of the combat in itself is of course getting to flex off on enemies as you can see with this enemy in particular there's a small part of the gauge that's now built up and the enemy is now winded and I'm going to be able to go in and get a critical blow and to me at least it's very very reminiscent of breaking an enemy's posture and sekiro and getting your death blow on a big part of this the spirit system not only does it impact you it also impacts the enemies that they're going to be going up against and so especially with the bosses with lesser enemies you're not going to see it as much but with bosses a big big element of the boss fights is going to be taking the spirit gauge and emptying it on out so that you can then get a finisher on a boss and for those that have played the Neo game you may remember how you know we could put put uh demonic enemies kind of into a critical state where their key was completely drained out we were able to essentially stun lock them and it's very similar to that except instead of of getting permanent stun locks now the goal is to get that Spirit bottom out win them and then go for a critical blow uh this is also going to tie into the morale system which to talk briefly about that we have fortitude and we have morale morale is the overall number that you see so right now there's a little four right about my character's leg and you may notice how it's actually blinking and that indicates that if I kill this enemy I'm going to fill up that much of my gauge if I kill this enemy I'm gonna fill up that much you can see how I'm getting more for killing the level six than I am for killing the level two kind of as you would expect and the morale system is is really interesting in a sense it's almost like a a temporary power level for the stage you're on because your morale is going to reset every time you wrap up a level but that's going to impact how strong you are in that level and so it creates a system that not only promotes exploration for finding marking Flags which we'll talk about in a moment but it also promotes smart combat because by taking all these enemies down I'm increasing my overall morale level and the higher that is the stronger I'll be throughout the level now you'll notice right there I took a critical attack from that enemy and it actually pulled me on down this is another element of the morale system that's really interesting is smart play is rewarded by gradually increasing your morale whereas sloppy play or getting hit by enemies will actually detract from your overall morale and pull that score on down so it's a really interesting kind of give and take system where you're rewarded for good play and obviously you're punished for poor play but you can still do fine even with poor play throughout the level we have marking flags and when you find a marking flag it's an increase your fortitude rank so now my fortitude rank is up to level four and what this means is even if I were to die even though I would lose my my current level of six I wouldn't drop below a four and so you're you basically have a baseline that becomes like the lowest you could potentially drop but by playing well and playing smart you can actually push yourself above that level and so much so that if you wanted to farm you could Farm yourself up to say 25 and then go into a boss fight and fight a level 20 boss and effectively just you know completely dunk all over them because you're so much stronger than what you're going to be up against with that boss so all in all I do think that the combat is a lot of fun I think there's there's a lot of of depth to the combat in this game especially once you you really dive into it with the various weapons martial arts and the Wizardry system in particular I think one of the big weak points of Neo was that you know your your spells and trying to play a mage build was ultimately going to be limited uh to to how much you could carry whereas in this game as long as I have uh as long as I have the spirit I can constantly cast spells so here's a good example as I died you can see I dropped down to four drop down to that fortitude rank instead of around um and I'd have to to build that back up but what's so what's nice here is as long as I have the the spirit available I can constantly just keep casting out my Wizardry spells now obviously if I get that meter completely full there's going to be a pause where I can cast again but just through attacking enemies and building that Spirit back up I'll be you know right back in the thick of things and so it's it's a really really interesting combat system I feel moving on from that though I feel like all I've done so far is give the Game Craze and while I do think the combat is easily the strongest point of the game there are some areas that I feel weren't as strong and one of those is gonna actually be the enemy variety uh while it's not absolutely terrible I think back to my first experience with Neo 1 and neo2 and I think one of the major complaints of neo1 was going to be enemy variety and that's something I think they addressed very well with the sequel to the game and I can't help but feel like with wool long they've kind of made a step back it's not that the the enemy variety is terrible and I do think a certain amount of it is you know you're fighting these humanoid type enemies and you know there's only so many ways you can make an enemy with a sword or an enemy with a bow but with the Demonic opponents I feel like especially as you move towards the end game while the bosses were diverse and a lot of fun I feel like there wasn't enough diversity in the uh in the Demonic opponents I think a good example of this is those enemies that we're gonna fight right now on the second level that we're also going to run into even as we work our way towards the very end of the game even on like the very last level there's going to be enemies that we're still going to encounter which are enemies that we have previously fall uh one thing I like about this game too you'll notice there I killed that guy by killing him I got revenge and I've boosted my morale instantly back up to 10. so it's not like you're constantly farming it's like if you mess up and you kill the right enemy you can of course counter that and get your morale back uh when you for the record when you die you would lose half of of your your genuine cheese which is like this game's version of Souls and then by killing an enemy you're gonna get back that genuine Chi and you can um you know spend it do whatever with it um but so yeah I mean at the end of the day there's just some areas where like there's an enemy we're about to come up on that's like a mini boss in this level and as we move towards the end of the game it's just like a regular Elite enemy that you're gonna find pretty frequently and you know that's that's the thing that I think is fairly common insoles like you know take the the enemy that is a boss early on it's basic early later um but that coupled with the overall lack of more Elite type enemies we're gonna fight it does start to wear on you a little bit where you know you're like oh I know I know how to fight this guy I know how to fight this guy and I would have liked to see more enemy divers I think more enemy diversity is is never a bad thing enemy diversity aside another area that I think the game really could have improved would be the overall level layout and level Design This level I actually think is one of the better ones and I do think environmental design in the game is fairly good you know there's there's good diversities like right now we're in a very very Rocky deserty type region there's there's jungles there's forests there's levels with a lot of water there's levels that are very cavernous and that area is good but because this is kind of grounded in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era there are a lot of battles that take place at various Forts and especially as you move towards the end of the game taking some of these forts you notice a lot of very similar themes and layouts that are very Square because you know they obviously didn't have the most you don't have the most intricate construction when you're looking to quickly establish a fort and I don't want to say it reminds me of Dynasty Warriors because it's it's not quite as as trapped as that but there are times in the game where you're like oh it's another fort with lots of square buildings and so stuff like that like it it does take away from the experience a little bit it's not terrible but I would have liked it to see see some more diversity in the design and the layout of those levels um now the actual biggest weak spot of the game uh I actually think it was a technical thing now I have been playing on PC for my for most of my run I have played a little bit on the series X and I've not played on on the PS5 from some some friends that are reviewing the game on PS5 I've heard there there are a couple of uh slow downs here and again on certain levels but it's good for the most part from the experience that I've had on the series X which is fairly limited I didn't run into any issues but I didn't play nearly as far as I did on the PC version now the PC version I haven't had any any like performance issues or glitches or anything like that I've had one crash in about 35 hours of play but what I have had is a visual artifact where the game will have this like a white Flicker and you've probably been able to see it a couple times even in this review video and you'll certainly see it in the let's play but I noticed that the more I play the game the more that this flicker became apparent if I if I've been uh you know if it's if it's a fresh PlayStation that fresh placed session which this is I'd like you know had just restarted the computer I won't I won't notice it and I don't know if it's related to like a memory leak or something but the more I play the game the more there is this white visual Flicker and it's very pronounced um it's either like a whole General screen flicker or it'll be located onto like a particular character element and even before this version of the game when I was playing on the earlier steam build uh there were some other Shader issues so just from a technical standpoint there's there's stuff that right there you just saw it right as I'm talking about it I couldn't have asked for better timing um but stuff like that it does start to wear on you you know and I know it's not a hardware related issue as I'm running on a 13900 KS and a 4090 so you know I know it's not a oh I need to update my PC issue so what is going on with the engine for the game essentially and and that's something that I obviously they can they can patch it but this is a problem that I've had pretty much the entirety of my my play experience of the game and while it doesn't render the game unplayable it is jarring and it is something that's it's like you know it's like a mosquito bite it's just it's constantly there and you constantly notice it and you really wish it would just stop so I definitely wanted to call attention to that one thing I did notice with the time I had on Xbox like I said relatively limited play time there I only played through the first couple levels just because I wanted to really get through the game and get a little bit into New Game Plus for this review uh but on Console the load times did feel long to me they weren't like bloodborne launch long but they were there were definitely loads that that felt in like the 15 20 second window where I'm like wow this is this is a significant load like this is this is taking a minute um you know it's been a while since I've had a loaded this this long and so I think that's that's something that's interesting because you know I feel like for the most part loads are are generally really good these days especially if you're on on PS5 or series X um even on on PC some of the loads that I got they weren't terrible but they were much much longer than I would expect you know when you're playing on a uh m2s SD PC loads are are typically non-existent you know most most games a load is you wouldn't even imagine they're instantaneous I think a good example of this is we were playing uh wanted Dead recently and there's like a funny load screen in the game that's it's representative of a meme and the game was loading so fast you would only catch a split second of that image before it would disappear off the screen so loading times could definitely be improved and as I mentioned the technical aspects of the game are an area that I feel they need to polish up a little bit more um moving on from there uh talked about some of the good talked about some of the bad the next thing I'm talking about are just some big departures because there are some what I would consider to be very significant changes from the overall Souls formula and it's stuff that I actually think is good I think it's just downright improvements uh of of what what people can can come to expect in a game like this and you know very similar to how Eldon ring made a lot of steps in making the game more approachable to players we've seen steps like that here they've very much made this so that veterans are going to have a great time but newer players can feel welcome to the franchise so and this probably the biggest thing with this is going to be the the battle sets so right now I have I'm gonna go ahead and save over this this is the the build I'm running with the battle set but if I go over here and I hit apply on this we can see new armor set new weapon set but even more than that we can see it's changed my stats around because I respect back in town and then I created this battle set and so you can essentially have multiple different builds that you're going to be able to change to on the Fly anytime you're at one of these flags and I think that's that's really really cool because I think a almost unnecessary struggle point of of souls games is the build you know sometimes you get like oh well you're a strength build and this boss it's it's much easier to fight with a defense build uh so you know good luck he's he's really quick and like yeah you could go and you could respect and you could come up with a bill that's going to counter that boss but stuff like that gets really really annoying and given in this game you know weapons are going to have uh specific scaling you know this weapon very clearly it's going to scale with with fire with Earth and then with wood whereas this one is going to be fire uh water and wood but what's so nice about this is we're able to create these prefab sets there's there's no key cost to it there's no uh you know marvel tier or or Divine scroll or anything that we need the game is just saying hey you don't like your build respect change up to something different and honestly I'd love that because it's just going to promote more flexibility it's going to have players trying out new things trying out a field that that they may have not done and what's so cool about that is especially if you're playing with a build and and it's not working out you know you're just you're not comfortable with the build you're like uh you know this this is this isn't working out for me at all I I don't think this is going to be the build I think I'd rather do a completely different building you know fire isn't working I want to be I want to be water I want to focus on deflects instead of martial arts or whatever the case is you can do that with literally zero downside besides the fact that you know you may need to level up a new set of armor or something and that's that's a level of Freedom that we haven't really seen in a game that's a Souls like before that's that's really really cool to me it's a boundary that's that's being pushed um moving on from that another thing that's that's really interesting here is the the follower system now um minor minor spoilers here because we're going to see followers if you've ever played a Dynasty Warrior game you obviously recognize all these names already uh but anyway looking at the reinforcements we can pull from different followers followers that were considered famous uh famous entries in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era and I've had zayum with me for the entirety of this Mission but I could also pull from other people you know one you or jongfei and what's cool about this is as that oath level gets up when it gets up to level five they're gonna be a little bit more effective in combat and then when it gets up to level 10 they're actually going to give you their weapon and armor so for example shouldn't say I leveled him up tiger Fang dual halberds as well as the young conqueror gear um that Warrior effect is just an extra effect you have while they're with you but by doing this by leveling him up I was given this set and it's going to be a four star version of it which is pretty good I was given his weapon and then so I'm immediately had the building blocks to put a Build Together which I think build creation uh in my opinion build creation was one of the most daunting things for a lot of players in Neo like builds were incredibly important in Neo and I think without uh you know having having the build creation kind of simplified like that I think that's really cool because obviously there's there's a extra tier of item as you go into New Game Plus similar to the Divine items from Neo so far I've only found one playing through New Game Plus but you can see we go five star instead of four star and it just seems like slightly better stats one extra is fixed so so a fairly fairly uh minimum increase overall but still it's you know the the fact that you can get four-star gear just from leveling up your followers is really cool because it's just going to make things that much easier that much more approachable and I think this is going to welcome a lot more people into not just this style of game but possibly even the Neo games as well um another thing is and we've talked about this already but the morale system we've never seen anything like the morale system in a Souls like and what's crazy about this is we we literally have a a in-game numerical level where we are man that was there's some good deflects right there um I'd call that out that's some good deflects but we have a in-game numerical level where we can raise this and it will make the game easier so if players are really struggling they can boost that morale level and get it up to 25 before they even go into the boss fight and they're going to have an advantage in that boss fight they're going to be stronger than the boss they're going to deal more Spirit damage they're going to take less damage and as long as they are successfully hitting their deflects they're going to have that Advantage for the entirety of that boss fight and that's something that I think is is really cool because at the same time if you are playing through the game and you're like oh well you know wool long is too easy for me these bosses aren't challenging go into a level 20 boss with a level 15 morale and you will change your tone very fast so they they literally know well it's not a well it's not a exact difficulty system that people always are saying Souls games need difficulties there there is a a way to make bosses easier or harder depending on how much time you want to spend in the game someone that wants to have an easier experience can achieve that by spending the time to find all the the flags or just Farm enemies and get their overall morale level up and I think that's that's really cool to me um but so overall what are my what are my final thoughts you know I've talked a lot about the good and and some things that I wasn't happy with honestly I think this this is a buy uh if you're the type of person that needs a score I think this game is going to land right around a 8 out of ten uh there are a lot of things to really like here build flexibility in particular I mean this is a a kind of a spell sword a Wizardry martial arts hybrid build which is really cool to me because I'm able to do some boss damage with my weapons but at the same time I have a huge emphasis on the fire damage that I'm able to put out onto a boss but I think that there is a lot of build diversity here for players and I think a lot of of world to enjoy especially if you're you're somebody that's familiar with these games from the Neo franchise I think they have done a good job of kind of staying true to what you've come to expect fair for those that have played Neo you know that you know you can you can turn your character into absolute monster and do Insane damage kind of how you just saw here and you can still do that in this game but at the same time if you were playing sloppy you will still absolutely get trounced and wow that wasn't visible with Fang Z given he's like the second boss in the game there are some bosses in this game we're rest assured you're gonna get bullied and you're gonna be like this game isn't fair I can guarantee it um so yeah final verdict I think it's a great game I had a lot of fun playing this a lot of fun and especially if you are a fan of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era and those characters you're gonna find something you really enjoy here um but I would have liked to see more enemy in level diversity and I really would like to see uh some stability and performance updates to fix the visual artifacts in the flickering so either way that's gonna wrap things up for me obviously we have a full let's play series of this game on deck and we're going to be prepping up for the walk through and doing you know starter guide build guides all that stuff so rest assured if you want wool lawn content it's gonna be heading your way but I'm gonna wrap things up here for now thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you guys next time

Channel: FightinCowboy

Views: 139,415

Keywords: Wo Long Fallen Dynasty Lets Play, Wo Long Fallen Dynasty Walkthrough, Wo Long Fallen Dynasty Gameplay Walkthrough, Wo Long, wo long fallen dynasty, wo long fallen dynasty gameplay, wo long gameplay, Wo Long Fallen Dynasty Fightincowboy, Wo Long FightinCowboy, Walkthrough, Wo Long Part 1, Wo Long PC Gameplay, wo long: fallen dynasty, fightincowboy, fighting cowboy, soulslike, fallen dynasty, wo long review, wo long review fightincowboy, wo long fallen dynasty review

Id: WKQgMEz93S8

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023