I knew Phantom Blade Zero looked good, but I really didn’t think it’d actually BE this good.
It’s currently sitting at 88 on Metacritic for both PC and PS5, with OpenCritic hovering around 91.
And there are a lot of 9s and 10s in here.
Wccftech — 10/10
TheGamer — 5/5
Game Informer — 9.5/10
GamesRadar+ — 4.5/5
IGN — 9/10
Push Square — 9/10
TheSixthAxis — 9/10
GameSpot — 8/10
VGC — 4/5
Eurogamer — 3/5
That Game Informer review basically came away calling it one of the best action games they’ve ever played. Okay then.
👍 The good stuff
The combat and boss fights. By far.
This is the part pretty much everyone agrees on. Supposedly the combat feels incredible, the animations look ridiculous, there are loads of weapons to mess around with, and the bosses are getting some ridiculous praise.
Exploration sounds surprisingly good too; there are optional paths, secret bosses and actual worthwhile stuff to find if you wander off the main path.
🤔 The in-between stuff
The difficulty seems to be all over the place.
Some critics found the normal enemies pretty easy while certain bosses absolutely destroyed them. Others think the difficulty options make the whole thing nicely approachable.
And while everyone seems to love the bosses, the ordinary fights apparently aren’t always quite as exciting.
👎 The not-so-good stuff
The story, mostly. Plus some technical roughness.
The story seems to be the thing most reviewers complained about. There’s lots of lore, flashbacks and names to remember, but not nearly as much substance to the actual characters or storytelling.
There are also mentions of frame drops, stuttering, invisible walls and other bits of jank, although it doesn’t seem nearly severe enough to drag down the reviews much.
And if you thought this was “just another Soulslike,” you’d be wrong. There are difficulty options, regular enemies stay dead after you kill them, and you don’t lose all your stuff every time you die. The game appears to be much more interested in letting you do cool martial arts stuff than repeatedly punishing you.
I think this might be one of the biggest surprises of the year for me. It might be a legit GOTY contender too.
Oh, and PC players: the finished game is around 145GB, but S-GAME says you need 300GB (!!) free just to preload it while everything decompresses. So you might want to start clearing out the SSD now lol.