There’s more than a few echoes of Stellar Blade in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, which invests as much into its main character’s wardrobe as the rest of the action-RPG experience. Bai Wuchang is a female pirate who can dodge, parry, and punish all manner of demonic foes from the underworld whether she’s wearing ancient armor or skin-tight underwear. “Gooner Souls is here y’all,” announced YouTuber FightinCowboy when the review embargo dropped yesterday.
The proclamation arrived alongside two screenshots of Bai’s ass and invited a flurry of gooner activity like seagulls raiding a bag of chips on the beach, though FightinCowboy’s review was a general endorsement of the studio Leenzee’s take on the Souls formula. FromSoftware expert Lance McDonald was even more impressed, calling it “an absolutely fantastic game” next to a sizzle reel of Bai fighting bosses in a thong. “The goon will inherit the earth,” one fan wrote back. It clearly already has.
Coming off Summer Game Fest, which was full of trailers for Souls-likes featuring lots of big bosses and I-frame dodges, and a couple of years of high profile releases all aping bits of the FromSoftware formula, it’s easy to feel dismissive of every new grim and grimy action game that comes your way. That’s how I initially felt about Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. The high-fidelity trailers looked like an indistinct mashup of Stellar Blade and Black Myth: Wukong. Was it another Unreal Engine 5 game from a first-time Chines studio relying on aping existing formulas to capitalize on waning days of a genre goldrush?
It may be the “Gooner Souls” of 2025, but that’s certainly not all it is. As everyone’s pointing out, Wuchang isn’t just more derivative Soulslike slop. It’s actually pretty fun and surprisingly deep. I’ve only played about five hours of Wuchang so far. I’m nowhere near ready to render a more definitive verdict on the totality of the game, but it has successfully laid to rest my initial fears and skepticism about it being a purely flashy yet hollow imitation of better games. I mean, it sort of is that in some ways, but there are some cool new twists to play with as well.
A familiar pace of combat—dodge, dodge, wait for an opening, attack—adds a resource called Skyborn Might that you build up by completing perfect dodges and parries (block to deflect or attack to clash and reflect the damage back). Skyborn Might is in turn used to unleash spells and more powerful attacks, which encourages you to constantly change up the flow of fights to optimize damage output. And instead of pouring points into stats every time you level up, there’s a Final Fantasy X-like Sphere Grid called the Impetus Repository, in which you level up individual nodes that each grant unique benefits. Add in a variety of weapons and armor to swap between, and you get a pretty fun combat loop that makes crafting a build feel less rote than in some other Soulslikes.
I’ve been playing on PS5, where performance has been fine (it’s also out on Game Pass today), but that’s apparently not the case for many people on PC at the moment. Wuchang is officially out today, and the Steam page is already full of negative reviews slamming the game for a lack of optimization. “Stutterchang: Fallen Frames,” wrote one user. “Stuttering, ghosting, blur visual, frame drop...well really bad performance with RTX 5070,” wrote another. That hasn’t stopped the game from hitting over 130,000 concurrent on Steam.
While some players say they’ve managed just fine on 3000 series cards, only 21 percent of the roughly 8,000 reviews so far are positive. There’s no demo either yet, so you can’t try the game out to see if it runs okay before buying the full thing, though Steam does allow refunds with less than two hours of playtime. “We are confident in the game’s performance within our recommended spec but we’re working on optimization,” the studio wrote on Steam today. “We are looking to issue a patch as soon as we can.”
For those not on PC, Wuchang is definitely worth a second or third look, especially for Souls fans and anyone else not already completely burnt out on “another one of those.” I do hear it has some pretty absurd difficulty spikes later on, but in the beginning its pretty forgiving. At the very least, don’t write-off Wuchang only because it looks like gooner Souls bait. And unlike Stellar Blade, it actually has plenty of outfits that look cool and aren’t completely absurd.
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