Phantom Blade Zero review: dark wuxia martial arts masters with an apprentice's execution

Phantom Blade Zero has a lot going for it to distinguish itself from other AAA Souls-inspired games emerging from China in recent years, thanks to its painstaking martial-arts mocap combat and unique kung-fu-punk vision, but several frustrating design choices keep it from being a work of a grand master.

Phantom Blade Zero wants you to feel like a kung fu master from the opening moments, and you should, since you play as Soul, an elite assassin for the Order. Even after a fateful duel leaves him with 66 days to live, there’s no cheap Metroid-style reset, and his martial arts prowess keeps growing.

Whether taking on another fearsome warrior one-on-one or a group of enemies, there’s a fluid confidence to his moveset that captures the spirit of the classic martial arts films that have inspired studio S-Game's ambitious debut, itself based on the indie RPG Rainblood: Town of Death that director Soulframe Liang made more than 15 years ago.

While China’s first AAA hits like Black Myth: Wukong and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers have leveraged both Unreal Engine 5 and the overwhelming influence of Soulslikes, S-Game tries to carve out its own identity, which it has coined as ‘kungfupunk’. Aesthetically, that means a curious blend of traditional Chinese culture with the modern: steel-factory architecture clashing with bamboo forests and temples from a more classic wuxia setting, and music where elegant pipa strings give way to electric-guitar rock riffs. More literally, it’s about how Sha-Chi, the energy that powers your kung fu (in-game, it’s basically your stamina gauge used for heavy combos and guarding attacks), also powers other technologies.

Phantom Blade Zero combat: martial-arts mocap and 50+ weapons

But it's definitely the kung fu that's centre-stage here, with all of the fighting styles and movements in-game captured by real martial artists, notably with the involvement of Hong Kong martial arts legend Donnie Yen (he also plays a character, albeit one you don't strictly encounter on the main story path, while spending most of it behind a mask) and his stunt team.

Even though your combos are essentially just spamming light or heavy attacks, your fighting style changes depending on the weapon you use, such as the one-handed Jagged Steel, which inflicts bleed damage, or the weighty two-handed Scarlet Wraithblade, which leaves energy-draining red spider lilies on the ground. The action can often feel too fast for its own good, so you're usually focused on your flurry of attacks before waiting to react to an enemy's blue or red attacks to parry or dodge, but hitting the prompt to unleash a finishing move is pretty satisfying.

Since most bosses drop new weapons, there's a thrill in getting a new toy to play with, and the game has more than 50 to find and master. It can feel a little overwhelming, and some may feel more gimmicky than useful, like a sword that gives you unpredictable drunken-martial-arts movements, so I naturally stuck to a few favourites, especially since I needed to prioritise upgrading them with my limited resources.

Nonetheless, there's an incentive to master more than one weapon, as switching automatically gives you a full Sha-Chi gauge. I often used up a gauge with one weapon, then quickly swapped to another to keep my offensive momentum going (a cooldown period does prevent you from just exploiting this).

Exploration and level design

Special weapons called Phantom Edges have limited uses but, used at the right time, can turn the tide in encounters, like a large axe that smashes through enemy shields or a chain sickle that tears through multiple surrounding enemies. Some even serve Metroidvania-style exploration, letting you access areas you couldn't reach before.

But despite some interesting designs, it's hard not to see these as glorified keycards, with most leading to little more than a small room and a chest for your trouble. Even though the chain doubles as a grappling hook, it's a bit disappointing once you realise that, like other traversal options such as running up cliffs or wall-running, it's limited to a button prompt at prescribed points in the environment.

This is one of the frustrating aspects of Phantom Blade Zero's rich, dense Wulin, even as it takes you from the bottom of a valley to mountain peaks, plus a massive lake you can explore by boat. It may all look pleasing to the eye, but it suffers from environments where you regularly bump up against invisible barriers as you try to parse the artistically rendered map (albeit elegantly emulating a Chinese ink wash painting that fills up the more checkpoints you come across).

This is especially annoying when a quest marker is supposedly close by, but you still have to wander aimlessly until you spot an interaction prompt, or discover there's actually a long-winded detour you're supposed to take instead. Doors that require specific keys are one thing, but I catch myself sighing when I approach a ledge you would expect to mantle in a similar game, only for Soul's kung fu skills to be arbitrarily eluded.

Boss fights and difficulty

Another question you might have about Phantom Blade Zero is whether it's a Soulslike. In many ways, it isn't. For instance, its checkpoints don't revive defeated enemies when you rest at them, and you also don't lose any resources permanently if you don't recover them. It nonetheless has some similarities, such as some labyrinthine level design where you'll encounter your share of doors inconveniently locked from your side, but it almost seems to turn into a Soulslike in challenge the moment you encounter bosses with hard-hitting attacks and where you have very limited heals (which you won't even be able to upgrade meaningfully until the game's midpoint).

On the one hand, some difficulty spikes are mitigated by bosses with a second phase, which also have a checkpoint so you're not forced to go through the first phase with fewer resources, and there are also difficulty options. The accessories you find and equip can also make a difference, especially ones that widen the parry and dodge windows, but my major gripe remains how spongy these boss fights feel, even for those that come back with a second phase.

This isn't unique to Phantom Blade Zero (see also Control Resonant, until Remedy patched it at launch), but it makes you question the point of staggering your opponent when, in this state, all your heaviest attacks still only chip away at their health. In many fights, it also makes your aggressive momentum push the enemy back until you inevitably get stuck on geometry. When it hits the camera, some cool-looking finishing moves get framed awkwardly, with parts of the environment obscuring the shot.

Phantom Blade Zero performance on PS5 Pro

Even though I was testing on PS5 Pro, I still ran into some pretty glaring technical issues during my playthrough, mostly in the latter half of the game, which I think came down to optimisation and bugs, since they persisted even after I turned off ray tracing and set the graphics to Performance mode. Sometimes the audio got knocked way out of balance between the voice acting and music, and in a couple of cases the big puddles I came across didn't show reflections so much as they looked more like a big mirror or a hole in the ground.

Most egregious, however, were framerate drops during combat that devolved into a slideshow, spoiling several major boss fights. I should be relieved they didn't kill me, since most of these happened when I was already locked into my (likely very VFX-laden) attack animations against a staggered opponent.

That may make it seem like I have a lot to be down about Phantom Blade Zero, but there is still plenty to admire, including cultural and artistic flourishes I can't share in this review. The Wulin's centrepiece, Pangzhen, is the kind of labyrinthine town that deserves to be talked about in the same breath as Bloodborne's Yharnam, so rich and dense with secrets and lore, and home to some of the game's best bosses, while there's clearly been a lot of thought that has gone into the intriguing characters and deep questlines that offer meaningful rewards, including having an impact on the ending you'll get. It's just a shame that the version I got to play still needed a bit more time in the oven.

A final note: S-Game released a patch that supposedly resolves most of the above issues, but it came after I finished my playthrough, so I didn't have a chance to go through it again to make sure every issue I encountered was fixed.

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