Wuchang: Fallen Feathers PS5 Review. There’s always another Soulsborne game coming around the bend. For better or worse, they keep coming. However, out from the ocean of mediocrity comes certain gems that can adequately be compared to the games that spawned the genre in the first place. One such game is called Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. It’s one thing to successfully mimic the greats, but it’s a whole other thing to take the genre and contribute to it in a big way. That’s Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, a smaller title swinging higher than its weight class with great success.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Review (PS5) – A New IP Worthy of Its Own Wuchang Clan of Games

Transparent Storytelling

You wake up with no memories. The world around you looks haggard and distraught, like a siege moved across the land. You also find yourself bearing feathers on your arm. The few sane humans you find early on inform you that you exhibit the early signs of Feathering, a zombie-like transformation that starts with wiping out your memories and ends with you mindless and feral.

The story isn’t much to call home about. You spend the entirety of the game looking for a cure for the Feathering. Along the way, though, you come across all kinds of different people caught in situations beyond their control. Soulsborne fans undoubtedly know these situations: someone barricading themselves in their homes, another person in a safe haven looking for an heirloom, or a fellow doer-of-good you meet at different points in the game.

This creates the in-world storytelling. You do find notes here and there of random things, but they generally serve more as directions rather than backstory. Instead, Wuchang delivers its story through dialogue instead of exploration. Like I said before, the story doesn’t move mountains or anything, but the fact that you need to find these people helps to make it your story. At the same time, the more straightforward approach to storytelling through dialogue makes following the narratives feel more natural instead of needing to piece together random bits of information along the way.

Calling Back to Soulsborne Roots

The world design helps to accentuate the drive forward. Much like the early Soulsborne games, you get around the maps using fixed paths rather than an open world. Map design, in fact, is one of Wuchang’s strongest features. Finding shortcuts in these types of games not only helps you get around more easily, but it also shows how the game naturally weaves these areas together.

Discovering these shortcuts and seeing how they interconnect is another intrigue that comes with this genre. Other copycat games try to do this, but it always feels expected or forced. In Wuchang, it always feels surprising and relieving. In my mind, that’s how you properly execute a good Soulsborne-esque world.

Having said that, there are some areas later in the game that truly challenge both your mettle and your patience. In particular, the snowy area throws more enemies at you, plus there are land mines AND crystals that inflict on you an incredibly cumbersome affliction. You cannot use healing items while under the effects of this affliction or you instantly die. You also instantly die from said affliction if you let its status bar completely fill up.

Nitpicking the Shortcomings

This brought out one aspect with combat that didn’t show its down side until the snowy area. If you go to destroy one of the affliction crystals while enemies are next to them, you automatically target the enemy. This can lock you in an attack animation that completely misses the crystal, leading to your instant death. This occurs while not using lock-on as well.

Visually, Wuchang looks fantastic while in motion and while standing still. Character faces are rigid, but that’s not that weird in games like this, since you don’t see them up close all that often. In some specific instances, graphics look like an afterthought. Snow stands out as the glaring example. When untouched, it looks fine. When things start interacting with it, the imprints look like one of those cross-section displays but with layers of snow. This looks weird, but the snow imprinting is still ambitious because the imprints even account for weapons that impact or pass through the snow.

What threw me off from the get-go is the incessant screen tearing. I tried messing with settings for a good while, jumping between performance and graphics mode, and even sliding a setting the game calls “Sharpness.” Finally, performance smoothed out while running it on a PS5 Pro using graphics mode and sharpness 10. Not sure why this wasn’t the default setting, but at least the options get the job done.

Fight, Your Way

Enemy design is something else, from little baddies to big bosses. The monster bosses make you regret approaching them just by looking at them. They’re imposing and gnarly, sometimes elegant, and just downright badass. Naturally, combat needs to feel engaging, but the enemies need to invoke shock and awe. Wuchang does exactly that in spades.

The other major ingredient needed for a good Soulsborne experience is well-executed combat. Wuchang has that in spades. To truly maximize your damage and potential, you need to properly channel combos. ________ allows you to chain combos almost perpetually if executed correctly. Certain actions, like a perfect dodge or certain combo attacks, reward you with a ________. This grants you a free heavy attack without any buildup, making your combos more devastating. They also don’t consume stamina and even give you back some of what you used. You can then chain in a different combo afterwards or even use the same combo over and over. There’s more control over how you play in Wuchang.

Speaking of control, the way you build your character is also much more freeing than in most other Soulsborne games. Instead, you put points into a skill tree that allow you to use more skills and do more damage. Each branch of the tree focuses on a weapon type. This lets you truly increase potency with one weapon if you so choose. You can also split points between two weapons and swap out, chaining combos that way.

Flexible Development

The other element to developing your character is it’s not based on character levels or upgrading your weapons. Instead, character progression relies solely on the skill tree. The tree includes nodes that increase strength or stamina or agility, whatever stat needed to strengthen that weapon’s capabilities. There’s no need to level up character stats or get resources for upgrading. Instead, those resources go into the skill tree for the same purpose. For instance, if you specialize with long swords, then you can equip two different ones at different times without needing to worry about enhancing the swords. They just do what you want them to do all thanks to the build you use.

The other part of this that makes Wuchang a great time is that you can respec your build at any worship point for free. There are no consequences for trying out a build and wanting to change it later. You don’t need items to respec either. You get back all of the resources you use on the skill tree and can then put them back into the tree in order to try another build. You don’t even need to completely wipe out your build either. You can select any node on the skill tree and clear all nodes past that one. This allows you to tweak your build instead of needing to reapply the entire thing.

The world you face in Wuchang is beyond hostile, but you still get options to manage some of it. No, there is no difficulty setting. Instead, the game allows you to manage two aspects of the game that give you the ability to make things a little easier-or a little harder, depending on your perspective.

Options Without Sacrificing Challenge

First, you control if the world resets. To clarify, if you go back to a worship stone, the game does not automatically respawn every enemy that you kill. Instead, you can choose whether you bring them back or not by using “Enter Dream.” By not using “Enter Dream,” your health potions do not automatically refill. At the same time, you get to wander around the map in areas you cleared out without needing to deal with enemies again. The icing on the cake is that using the worship stone does not reset your madness level.

On that note, madness level does a couple of things for you: higher madness level increases the damage you deal, the damage you take, and the experience you gain. Conversely, lower madness level decreases your damage, enemy damage, and your experience gained. This is the second aspect of the game that gives you freedom to adjust your experience.

This comes down to earning madness through killing certain enemy types. Since these types can be found practically everywhere, your madness levels spend a lot of time in the higher percentages. Items allow you to lower your madness and maintain more control over how much damage you take, but you need to stay on top of that.

With this in mind, the game practically wants you to play with high madness. Among all of the things the game offers in terms of choice, the decision to make low madness more work to maintain takes away a bunch of control from an experience that has done an admirable job of providing control over gameplay without sacrificing the gameplay itself or the challenge.

A True Soulsborne Contender

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t need to be to stand among the best in the Soulsborne genre. It doesn’t just mimic what makes these games fun but expands on the formula that few others could. Challenging gameplay, riveting exploration, and unique control mechanics help to elevate Wuchang well above the run-of-the-mill Soulsborne clone. Wuchang more than deserves its own franchise.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers releases on PS5, Steam, and Xbox Series on July 23, 2025.

Review code kindly provided by publisher