Editor’s note: Phantom Blade Zero is a dark wuxia action-adventure game independently developed by the Chinese game developer S-GAME, built with Unreal Engine 5. The game features a distinctive “kung fu punk” aesthetic, fusing traditional Chinese wuxia culture with mechanical fantasy elements.
Players take on the role of “Soul,” a swordsman who has been framed and has only 66 days left to live, as he uncovers a vast conspiracy in a perilous jianghu. The game focuses on fast, fluid action combat, a rich weapon system, and cinematic martial arts choreography, and will officially launch on PlayStation 5 and PC on October 29, 2026.
This review is based on the PC version of the game, and the review code was provided by S-GAME.
This article was originally written by IGN China; the original author is Charles Young. SSPAI is republishing it with authorization and has made only minor adjustments to the article’s formatting. Reproduction without authorization is prohibited. Read the original >
Before getting into the formal review content, I want to first share how I feel. If the success of Black Myth: Wukong two years ago was, to some extent, somewhat attributable to a bit of luck from “the right timing, the right place, and the right people,” then after finishing Phantom Blade Zero, one thing I will be very certain of is:
In the foreseeable future, when Western game creators fall into the predicament of creative bottlenecks, are held hostage by politically correct elements, and have their hands and feet bound by highly industrialized commercial logic, producing one after another pipeline canned game that could be called industrial garbage, then please let game creators from China teach them a good lesson and let them relearn what a high-quality 3A game with substantial content should be like.
So, to evaluate it using a sentence pattern I have used before: in every dimension of its performance, Phantom Blade Zero exceeds my expectations.
A Continually Rising Combat Experience
As an ARPG, the design of the combat portion is the game’s core experience. In this game’s combat, in addition to ordinary attack and defense routines, you also need to pay attention to enemies’ attacks that flash blue and flash red. When these two types of attacks appear, if you can achieve a precise parry or precise dodge by mastering the timing of the button press, you can not only completely avoid danger and create a counterattack, but also be accompanied by gorgeous presentation.
Similar games often design a stamina bar for characters to limit the frequency and duration of the character’s actions. This game changes the stamina bar into a “killing intent” value. In addition to the original role of the stamina bar, players can also actively use the killing intent value during attacks to unleash powerful attack methods such as “killing intent combos,” returning part of the initiative to players from what was originally a completely passive system.
At the same time, both enemy soldiers and bosses have the same killing intent value. By using precise parries and special attacks to consume the opponent’s killing intent value, once it is emptied you can achieve a “guard break” effect and then deal greater damage to the opponent. And if you only focus on defending and are guard broken by the enemy, you will suffer the same backlash.
The effect brought by this entire combat system is the biggest difference between this game and Soulslike ARPGs. Combat is no longer merely a simple conversion between attack and defense, but a martial arts routine that integrates “defense within attack, attack within defense.” Players must pay attention to their own state while also seizing the opportunity to find the opponent’s flaws; every exchange may determine a shift in the battle’s advantage. The entire combat rhythm therefore has a strong sense of cadence. After mastering the enemy’s patterns through several trials and errors, the combat process becomes as smooth and flowing as the fight scenes in a wuxia film.
The growth of the protagonist Soul is also not simply reflected in values such as stamina, endurance, and attack power; on the contrary, you cannot see these numbers in the game. The protagonist’s leveling up is also not achieved by gaining experience points. Instead, by collecting key items related to the story in the game, you will receive prompts that the protagonist’s attack power and health have increased.
Similarly, the protagonist’s skill tree is not simply upgraded by gaining experience points, but is fully integrated with the game process. By meeting certain necessary conditions, your skill tree can be expanded further and further, and the combat skills the protagonist thereby gains become stronger and stronger, making combat more and more effortless.
Although weapons in the game have clear numerical settings such as attack power, beyond the numbers, more is achieved through upgrades that allow weapons to use an increasingly rich variety of attack methods. In the later stages of the game, you can also use a system called “Soul Forging” to give weapons more powerful special skills, and they may even transform into weapons of another attribute. This method of enriching combat by continuously upgrading weapons allows the game to maintain a continually rising combat experience from beginning to end.
Weapons and Phantom Edges together total as many as 55, though of course this number includes some weapons that become entirely new weapons after Soul Forging. The secondary weapons, Phantom Edges, are also not merely simple combat aids; the game also has many mechanisms or paths that can only be opened with specific Phantom Edges, so even areas you have already visited can thereby open up an entirely new map.
Add to that the assistance of the two items, accessories and medicines, and you will find that the game naturally forms a set of build concepts: one-handed, two-handed, and dual-wielded weapons each have two coordinates of attack speed and power; Phantom Edges provide corresponding assistance and specific skill attack methods in combat; accessories further amplify a weapon’s power or increase the protagonist’s attribute endurance; and medicines, while restoring health, can also provide some special effect stacking effects.
Players of all types can find their most handy build in the game, and when facing different types of enemies they can also choose different configurations according to the battle situation. The relatively balanced weapon settings provide ample room for different playstyles to shine. I can fully imagine that in the hands of different players, everyone will have a completely different way of clearing the game.
What is even more considerate in the game’s design is that, whether it is weapon upgrades or skill tree growth, the game allows rollback operations at any time. This makes it convenient for players to redistribute limited upgrade materials at any time to try out stronger weapons obtained in the game or skills they need more, and to a certain extent it also ensures freshness in the game process.
Astonishingly Large Amount of Game Content
In the previous final preview, I mentioned that in the game’s first level alone, it took five or six hours to explore the entire map to about seventy or eighty percent. That playtest gave me a preliminary concept of the game’s overall volume and further aroused my curiosity: just how big is this game’s volume?
When I cleared the game on the normal difficulty “Breaker,” the save time in the game had already exceeded 30 hours, and then I spent about another ten or so hours to push the game’s completion rate to close to 100%. This is only the game time shown on the save file; my actual perceived playtime was even longer, because my Steam account shows that I have already spent more than 55 hours on this game.
The entire game has no clear chapter divisions. As the story progresses, the game’s regional map gradually unfolds. Although entering a new map marks the story advancing to the next stage, each map basically contains areas that can only be entered after a certain story progress, which often means there will be another large new area to explore.
But in Phantom Blade Zero, I have a clear feeling that for more than 80% of the game time, I was constantly in the process of exploring new content. Although quite a lot of time was spent shuttling back and forth between old and new maps, that was by no means boring, repetitive exploration; the game’s progression design ensures that players are always advancing new content.
Among the dozens of weapons mentioned earlier, each weapon has different action modules for different skills at different levels. In the game’s monster compendium, you can see hundreds of designs of different forms, and many bosses in particular have two or even three form changes at different story and combat stages. The execution animations for each weapon against different enemies are also different, and the amount of work invested behind this is enormous.
Once enemy soldiers in this game are defeated, they do not respawn. When I first saw this design, I was a little worried that the game would therefore seem somewhat empty. But after actually experiencing the game, I understood that this design is necessary, or to put it the other way, a design where enemy soldiers respawn is unnecessary, because this time the game map is large enough, there is enough new content you need to explore, and the materials needed for upgrades are also sufficient. There is completely no need to go back to old areas to fight repeatedly.
Although the entire game has designed so much content for exploration and challenge, the game never deliberately makes things difficult for players from beginning to end. For example, although the map has a highly spatial multi-dimensional design logic, it completely does not deliberately make players get lost or take detours. Many road nodes are naturally unlocked during normal exploration, and even the placement of bell save points is set at the positions where you need them most, giving a rather thoughtful feeling. More importantly, the game places some rewards in these nooks and crannies, so players who like to “lick the map” will almost never make a trip in vain.
In addition, as mentioned in the final preview, at higher difficulties it is not only numerical changes such as enemy HP; enemy attack patterns also change somewhat. The offensive and defensive routines players have grown familiar with at normal difficulty must be adapted to anew at higher difficulties, which increases both the game’s replayability and its challenge—such a “hardcore” approach to game production is rare these days.
Cultural tension bridging East and West
The story and plot, built on the “wuxia punk” worldview originally created by S-Game, is another highlight of this title that is even more endlessly memorable, on top of its core experience and massive scale. Of course, to avoid spoiling the surprise, I won’t reveal too much here.
With years of experience making the Rain Blood and Phantom Blade series as a foundation, the characters and story of this title have, I believe, long been repeatedly polished in the mind of producer Liang Qiwei. Like many classic wuxia novels, the story of Phantom Blade Zero has almost no cultural barrier in terms of understanding. I believe not only Chinese players can be immersed in it; Western players will also easily grasp the meaning behind this story.
Beyond Soul’s main storyline, the large number of side quests and small NPC stories are also very moving. These stories do not affect the main plot, but they play a very large role in enriching the worldview. I believe that searching for clues to such stories in the game, along with those unforgettable supporting characters, will become the driving force for players to explore the game’s depth.
Matching the entire story and worldview is the game’s art style setting. On the basis of maintaining the traditional Chinese wuxia jianghu style, it introduces steampunk elements with a fantasy flavor, allowing two elements from completely different eras—the traditional Chinese eighteen kinds of cold weapons and the steel towers belching white steam—to be organically combined with the game’s scenes and characters, without making people feel abrupt or incongruous at all, forming this title’s unique visual spectacle.
What is quite stunning is that S-Game has arranged in the game a large amount of traditional Chinese culture that Chinese players can understand at a glance and Western players will marvel at. For example, the previously revealed boss the Lion Dance Master is a reinterpretation of traditional Guangdong lion dance culture, and the game also includes artistic recreations of traditional Chinese culture such as opera, and even a performance of a traditional art treasure lasting more than twenty minutes. To avoid spoiling the surprise, I won’t specify here, leaving it for players to discover for themselves in the game; I believe the passage here will make players all over the world gasp in amazement.
In addition, S-Game has also put considerable effort into the game’s music. For example, when players are browsing the map, they will hear different background music depending on the position the cursor moves to. In different levels, and at different combat stages, they will also hear music suited to the current scene. In particular, the song after the battle with a certain key character, I believe, will also become an unforgettable game moment for players.
As for the screen time of Donnie Yen that players care about, I can only say that you will encounter him more than once in the game, and he will challenge the player’s martial arts prowess level by level in the game. As an international film star well known in both China and Hollywood, his performance in the game contrasts pleasingly with the cultural tension the game presents in its attempt to bridge East and West.
Conclusion
After finishing Phantom Blade Zero, that long-lost feeling of melancholy and loss welled up again. This chivalrous journey of the protagonist Soul will be presented in a special segment of the plot in the game’s final stages, and I believe every player, when they reach this point, will forget all the hardships and obstacles of the completion process and be moved by the parts of the game that are full of emotion and righteousness.
The game of course cannot be absolutely flawless; this title, whether in system design or character setting, has some slight disconnects between earlier and later parts, which may be an unavoidable coordination issue over the long development process. In the media review version, we also encountered bugs, including one that made a quest impossible to complete, as well as minor issues with performance optimization, but S-Game has confirmed these will be fixed in the official release.
A saying often used about domestic games in the past was that Chinese game creators do not lack technology; what they lack is experience making large-scale AAA games. But the quality demonstrated by Phantom Blade Zero gives us sufficient reason to believe that once the uphill phase of accumulating experience is passed, games made with development technology accumulated over many years and a more internationally minded vision will be absolutely world-top-tier.
Phantom Blade Zero will undoubtedly become one of the must-play games for players this year, and I firmly believe that in the future we will see more and better domestic games like this.