REVIEW Phantom Blade Zero: we've finished the game, and it really is the masterclass it claims to be

Let's get the question you're surely asking as you read these opening lines out of the way, even if it seems obvious: yes, we finished Phantom Blade Zero. On standard difficulty (Pioneer), it took us more than 40 hours to reach the story's conclusion. A good forty-odd hours during which we poured our guts into meeting the challenge set by the S-Game team. Even though Phantom Blade Zero is absolutely not a Souls-like, when it comes to torture it can look any FromSoftware production dead in the eye. In every game whose sole purpose is to bring you to your knees, there's always that skill check, that moment where your progress grinds to a halt in front of a boss who seems insurmountable at first. We felt that sense of despair at the end of Lu Village, just before reaching Pangzhen. We'll let you discover the festivities for yourselves.

YouTube content, hidden until you have authorised it.
If you allow this content to be displayed, Google will drop cookies on your device and receive your IP address.

Show this contentChange my choice

A game with heart

Reducing Phantom Blade Zero to a string of boss fights would be unfair, since S-Game has taken particular care over the story. We're squarely in wu xia pian territory, those Chinese martial arts films in which a lone hero follows a moral code of his own making. That's exactly the portrait of Soul, who stands accused of murdering Mu Tianmiao, founder of the Order. Considered one of the most gifted Shadow emissaries of his generation, he now has a price on his head. Phantom Blade Zero opens, in fact, on a fratricidal duel between Soul and Zuo Shang. After the latter runs him through the heart, and as he is about to draw his last breath, he is offered a second chance by the Flesh Sculptor. The price? Living with a corrupted heart that will stop beating in 66 days. On Wanderer (the equivalent of 'Easy'), Pioneer and Hell Explorer (the equivalent of 'Hard'), lumbering yourself with a sick heart has no consequences. On 66 Days difficulty, however (unlocked once you've finished the game), deaths are capped at 66. Right then.

The storytelling, exemplary in its judgement, never drags us into needless heaviness, even though the richness of Phantom Blade Zero's world was the perfect trap.

Wulin, promised land for kung-fu fans

A genuine ode to Chinese literature, Phantom Blade Zero piles on the writings you pick up throughout the adventure. In fact, everything, absolutely everything is a pretext to detail the events unfolding in Wulin, the fictional realm proper to wu xia pian. In the final third of the game, we're even treated to a rather lovely puppet show that keeps us occupied for a good fifteen minutes. The storytelling, exemplary in its judgement, never drags us into needless heaviness, even though the richness of Phantom Blade Zero's world was the perfect trap. The narrative brings forth secondary characters such as Inanis, Yu'er and Mu Xiaokui. We won't say more so as not to spoil the surprise, but S-Game has made sure they aren't mere foils for Soul. We assumed he'd be a protagonist who could only express himself through his blade (a true hallmark of wu xia pian), but it turns out he's perfectly capable of holding a conversation. Given that this is the first time the studio has developed a game with AAA ambitions, we can assume that abandoning the silent treatment is a way of winning over a Western audience that isn't necessarily familiar with Chinese folklore. That said, the game's many flashbacks show a Soul who is far more open than the one we play as.

As for the interface, Phantom Blade Zero aims to be as clear as possible, with a remarkably legible map. At a glance, you can locate save points, main missions, side quests and which areas are accessible or blocked off. The same goes for the character screen, which lists your main weapons among other things. Rather than cluttering things up with a mountain of stats (half of which players end up ignoring anyway), S-Game has kept only a handful (damage, status effects, guard break and so on). While we'd have appreciated a proper video tutorial, the developers have at least taken the time to list the combos; and clicking the right stick brings up the advanced techniques. We're a long way from the indigestible menus seen elsewhere.

Contrary to what you might have assumed when Phantom Blade Zero was first announced, exploration sits right at the heart of the game. It isn't an open world as such, but rather eight interconnected regions within the Wulin. Whatever the area, discovery always follows the same pattern: between Soul and the destination (which you can reveal using the spirit eye to get your bearings), a thick fog blankets the territory, and it's up to the player to poke around and work out which route to take. Every time you ring a bell, part of the map is uncovered, and you activate a new save point in the process. 

Exploration with a keen edge

The level design clearly encourages you to comb through every nook and cranny, and it's fair to say that Phantom Blade Zero is more than generous with the curious. We don't know how it pans out on the higher difficulty levels, but on Pioneer we finished the adventure with our pockets so stuffed with treasure we didn't know what to do with it all. Even while getting on with a main quest, it's not unusual to stumble across an item meant for a side mission. Some will reckon that undermines the exploration. For our part, it stops Phantom Blade Zero from flagging between two big fights. Still on the subject of exploration, there's no avoiding the Metroid influence and the phantom blades you prise from the corpses of bosses. Once you've got them, you can retrace your steps and reach new areas. The axe, for instance, is essential for shattering the huge iron chains, while the sickles double as a grappling hook. Then there's the bastion, invaluable for shielding yourself from crossbow bolts. The tiger cannon can blow open any cracked wall, Zelda-style, while brambles don't last long against the flaming mane.

Even some enemies dressed like beggars can wipe out three quarters of your HP in just two hits. We lost count of the failures we had to swallow, jaw and fists clenched. At 2am, nobody's coming to save you.

In short, here again is the perfect excuse to stray from the main thread and look into the side quests, which work hard to flesh out Phantom Blade Zero's lore. Dwelling on the extras can also make the adventure easier on yourself, particularly against bosses. A talisman that boosts damage dealt to a shield by 50%, a shard of ancient armour that cuts damage by 40% when your HP is full, a relic that increases damage against mounted enemies by 30%, or a lightning guard that halves incoming lightning damage: these are just a few of the accessories that saved our skin when despair came knocking. It only makes the sense of accomplishment that much sweeter.

S is for suffering

Even though Soulframe Liang (who is both the head of S-Game and the game's director) refuses to call Phantom Blade Zero a Souls-like, learning patterns the hard way is very much part of the deal. And we're not just talking about bosses. Even some enemies dressed like beggars can wipe out three quarters of your HP in just two hits. We lost count of the failures we had to swallow, jaw and fists clenched. At 2am, nobody's coming to save you. No walkthrough to check whether you've missed an important item, just an overwhelming urge to hurl the controller at the wall and curse the entire planet.

Yes, it would have been easy to give in and drop down to Easy (Traveller), but you'd then be missing everything that makes Phantom Blade Zero so compelling, namely its demands, its merciless streak and, above all, a combat system that only truly shows what it's made of once the difficulty gets dizzying. Bearing in mind that S-Game had, until now, been making mobile games, it's hard to believe they've pulled off something of this calibre. The fluidity, the control, the intensity and the precision are simply staggering. The animations are worthy of the greatest kung fu films, and you can clearly tell Donnie Yen did more than just lend his face to Mó Yuan.

Sha-Chi isn't purely defensive. It's also crucial for landing combos that break an opponent's guard far more quickly. Once you've grasped the principle, it turns into a genuine game of chess.

The man who played Ip Man on the big screen was notably involved in choreographing the fights. The result: a coherence of movement that's rarely seen, especially when Soul is set upon by several opponents at once. It all flows at a ferocious pace, with the hero even adopting a particular stance when two enemies try to strike him simultaneously.  That sense of watching an unbroken stream of lightning-fast blows is largely down to the parry mechanic, which immediately brings Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice to mind. It's inseparable from the Sha-Chi gauge. If you simply block enemy attacks, the gauge drains. Parry with the right timing, however, and it stays intact, giving you the chance to follow up straight away, all the more so because the enemy is left vulnerable.

Parry, strike, repeat

When the Sha-Chi bar empties, your guard is broken. Both the bestiary and Soul are then wide open to a brutal attack that can prove fatal. Note that the hero and the creatures aren't treated the same way. If the protagonist can back off and let the gauge refill when things get hairy, his opponents don't have that luxury. To keep fights balanced, the developers came up with a subtlety that puts your reflexes to the test. Basically, when an enemy launches a flashing blue attack, you press L1 to counter it, and when they go for a flashing red one, it's R1 to dodge. Miss the window and the punishment is immediate. In the closing stretch of the adventure, that means being stripped to the bone by a particularly nasty finishing move that leaves you precious little chance of walking away.

The lock-on is there to help you keep your bearings in this forest of raving lunatics. That said, S-Game has made a fairly questionable call here. When you lock onto one opponent and pull off a perfect dodge against another enemy, the lock snaps back to the original target instead of staying on the enemy who just hit you. It wrecks both the readability of the action and the advantage you'd have gained had the reticle stayed on the second enemy.

The stealth side of things, on the other hand, we're not buying at all. The mechanic feels bolted on at the last minute, as if Soul simply had to go treading on Tenchu's turf.

Sha-Chi isn't just for defence. It's also crucial for unleashing combos that break an opponent's guard far more quickly. Once you've grasped the principle, a genuine game of chess unfolds. Going on the offensive forces you into perfect parries afterwards (since you're burning Sha-Chi), but playing it too safe gives the enemy all the room they need to land their biggest attacks. Being able to carry two main weapons at once lets you swap between them with a tap of the d-pad, continuing the combo while instantly refilling the Sha-Chi bar. There's a cooldown system to stop you abusing the trick, of course, but it's seriously handy for dealing damage while you wait for the surge (a sort of powerful super combo) to become available.

With some thirty main weapons and no fewer than 25 phantom blades, Phantom Blade Zero is a fantastic playground for moulding Soul into a character that suits your fighting style. We opted, for instance, to pair the raw power of the chipped blade with the speed of the white serpent and the red viper. That let us press bosses like a jackal before really hurting them once their guard broke. The phantom blades aren't to be sniffed at either — hats off to the Kuye Temple prayer beads, which summon bronze men when you find yourself alone against a horde of maniacs. It's no substitute for proper co-op, but it draws some heat while you catch your breath.

Cutting edge

Since we're on the subject of phantom blades, it's worth noting that they sometimes slip into fights via contextual actions that cost no residual sparks at all. Freebie. The brutal executions are every bit as satisfying, especially when they claw back a few precious HP. Nice touch, too, the QTEs that extend finishing moves when there are still bodies left to carve up. The stealth side of things, on the other hand, we're not buying at all. The mechanic feels bolted on at the last minute, as if Soul simply had to go treading on Tenchu's turf. It was entirely dispensable. We'd rather dwell on the abilities, which genuinely add something to the game. We'll let you discover them for yourself, but shaving 2 seconds off the weapon-swap cooldown is anything but a luxury.

We've grumbled plenty about the difficulty, yet Phantom Blade Zero is actually rather magnanimous compared with other instruments of torture. We've already mentioned « Traveller » mode (where enemy defences crumble in no time), but there's more. Checkpoints are often placed right next to bosses (so you reach the lair in one piece), you're not forced to farm for hours to pump up your character's stats, mobs don't respawn every time you save, and when you bite the dust during a boss's second phase, you don't have to slog through the whole first stage again. The icing on the cake: if a weapon you've upgraded with residual dust and a mountain of resources doesn't suit you, you can reset it with a regression talisman and get every material you spent refunded on the spot. In short, when you lose, it's purely because you have zero skill.

For once, we ran our Phantom Blade Zero review on both a launch PS5 and PC. As you've probably already guessed, Sony's console coughs up a lung here, despite S-Game's optimisation efforts (a patch weighing over 50 GB landed just before this review went live, for what it's worth). We ran into some pretty brutal frame rate drops, especially during a night-time boss fight in driving rain. We must have been down to about 10 fps at that point. While things are no doubt tidier on PS5 Pro, the game is a genuine work of art on PC. The kungfupunk setting, pitched as a fusion of Chinese martial arts and steampunk, explodes across the screen and gives the game a visual identity all of its own. FromSoftware's eye for aesthetics has been praised for years, but Soulframe Liang and his teams have landed a hell of a punch for a first outing beyond mobile games.

With Unreal Engine 5 as an accomplice, the work on the boss fights is quite simply incredible. We're not just talking about how these behemoths are modelled, but about everything that feeds into the epic feel of encounters where you're permanently walking a tightrope. Pin-sharp staging, a soundtrack that lifts you clean off the ground, cannily chosen backdrops, tension ratcheting up until hostilities break out: it's all there. Phantom Blade Zero also serves up breathtaking vistas and an art direction that plays with contrast with dizzying cheek. Hats off, gentlemen!