What you need to know
- Team Ninja's new Soulslike action RPG, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, has been getting review bombed on Steam due to severe issues with its PC port.
- At the time of writing, only 35% of reviews are positive, and the game has a "Mostly Negative" rating.
- Reportedly, these problems include terrible performance, janky and uncomfortable mouse and keyboard controls, and a bug that causes the game to slow down whenever the framerate falls below the max FPS setting.
Team Ninja's highly anticipated Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is finally here, and its blend of intense Sekiro-style melee combat with RPG systems and exploration-focused mechanics brings quite a unique experience to Soulslike fans. If you were planning on getting it on PC, though, you may want to hold off for the time being.
Throughout its launch day, Wo Long's PC port has been absolutely ripped to shreds on Steam, the main platform that this version of the game is available on. At the time of writing, it has a "Mostly Negative" score with over 4,000 reviews written, a meager 35% of which have a positive rating.
Looking through the negative reviews, it looks like the biggest issues with the port are that it has terrible performance and awful mouse and keyboard controls. Many players are reporting severe framerate drops, and some haven't even been able to launch the game at all. Meanwhile, the default keyboard control layout has been criticized for being horribly unintuitive (deflecting, a move you'll rely on constantly in Wo Long, is tied to the...Tab key? Why?), and bizarrely, mouse input is affected by controller joystick deadzones. Reportedly, this makes the camera feel extremely janky, as it won't budge unless your mouse movements are fast enough.
One particularly scathing review also described a particularly nasty bug that causes the game speed to change if your current FPS and max FPS setting are different. For example, if you set your max FPS to 120 but your framerate dips below that — and based on what reviews say about Wo Long's performance, it will — the entire game will slow down, only running at normal speed once you reach 120 FPS again. You can mitigate the effects of the bug by setting your max FPS to a lower value like 60, but regardless, inconsistency like this in a game that emphasizes precise parry timing is dreadful.
Overall, it's extremely disappointing to see that the PC port is this bad, as the game ran well on my Xbox Series X when I played it for my Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty review. Team Ninja created something incredible here, but until the developers deploy some much-needed performance and bug fixes, I'd steer clear of it on PC. Notably, the game's on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, so if you're a subscriber, you can check it out that way without putting $60 on the line.
