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What do you play if you love kung fu? Sifu for flawless combat? Yakuza for beautiful and hilarious storytelling? Sleeping Dogs for grit and adrenaline? What if you want an open-world wuxia game that lets you do whatever you want? For that, you play The Matchless Kungfu, an early access game that’s already one of the best sandboxes in existence. It offers deep gameplay, an enchanting atmosphere, and innovative open-world exploration, yet it has less than 300 average monthly players according to Steam Charts. What makes The Matchless Kungfu so magical, and why isn’t it more popular?
Everything Knows Kung Fu
“I want to be able to do anything” is an itch that only a few games scratch well. Kenshi and Mount & Blade: Bannerlord come to mind. In The Matchless Kungfu you can wander the country fighting everyone like you’re training to beat Goku. Enter a martial arts tournament. Join the Imperial Guard and uphold the law. Become an assassin and profit from every kill. You can be a merchant, cat burglar, fisherman, arsonist, horse tamer, or dutiful husband or wife. Build your own fortress complete with shops and assembly lines or go into real estate. Join martial arts temples or start your own faction.
Everyone in The Matchless Kungfu knows kung fu. The bandits? Kung fu. The snakes? Kung fu. The chickens? Kung fu. If you want to tame a horse, prepare to take a few 1200-lb crane kicks to the head before you defeat and befriend it. You’ll need strategic thinking, special abilities, and good equipment if you want to survive the unique turn-based combat. It’s the martial arts equivalent of Rock Paper Scissors. Specialize in Palm or Hidden Weapon attacks, master poison and fire, or become a jack-of-all-trades. There’s a learning curve, but once you understand the system’s quirks, it’s a beautiful thing.
Worldbuilding and Wuxia Woes
The world starts as a single square plot of land, and from there you choose which tiles to add, expanding the setting as you go. Want to surround yourself with cozy bamboo groves and lakes? Maybe you’d prefer wintry mountains, lava plains, and poisonous swamps? They’re all yours. If you’d rather step into a world that’s already complete, you can have the game randomize and lay out all the tiles before you begin. It’s a system that delivers handcrafted locations while keeping things interesting from one playthrough to another.
If The Matchless Kungfu is so good, why doesn’t it have more players? In the game’s defense, it’s in early access. Also, its marketing is lacking, to say the least. Most gamers have simply never heard of it. As you’d expect of an early access game, bugs and jankiness are also common. The biggest issue outside of those is the rough state of the English translation. Unlike Amazing Cultivation Simulator (the closest we have to a Chinese Rimworld), you don’t need the wiki open on a second screen just to play, but Matchless feels a lot like bad kung fu movie dubs. For some players, that’s a dealbreaker until the translation improves.
Matchless Jank
The Matchless Kungfu is by no means finished. If you’re turned off by rough edges and some shallow systems, you may want to wait before diving in. However, if you’re a fan of sandbox or kung fu games, Matchless deserves a spot on your watchlist. Follow it and watch it grow. What’s here is already worth the price, but every major update nudges that game closer to being the complete wuxia experience. A game this good deserves more than 300 players, and not just because you can cuddle your horse for a mood buff.
The Matchless Kungfu is available for PC in early access.
