Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Review - Beautiful and Deadly

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In the past decade, one genre that has become almost as crowded as FPS games is the soulslike genre. I can’t blame developers for chasing it, though. Everyone sees the success of FromSoftware and wants to emulate it. Sadly, there are only a handful of games that reach the quality of the said studio. Previously, I thought Lies of P was the only title that mirrored everything that makes one of these games so unique. Of course, with a few welcome additions. Now, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers joins the podium as one of the best non-FromSoftware soulslikes on the market, bringing the formula we’ve grown accustomed to, plus many new additions that make it even more engaging at times.

A Warrior’s Journey

Frankly, I would love to go into detail about the plot of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, but if this game has one thing right about the genre, it is its ambiguity. That’s not a bad thing, though. Soulslikes, as a whole, have never been great at telling a story. A recent example of one that presents its narrative in a digestible way is Lies of P. It features a plot that’s easy to follow, with the added environmental storytelling the genre is known for. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, however, leans too much on the environmental aspect and leaves lore details on items and ambiguous conversations. Yet, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a story.

The plot starts with Wuchang, our beautiful yet deadly protagonist, waking up in an amnesiac state inside a cave. She then steps into a fictional representation of the land of Shu during the late Ming dynasty. The most significant difference is that a disease known as Feathering is plaguing the area, transforming people into monstrous, bird-like creatures. This takes our heroine across some of the most gorgeous areas I’ve seen in a soulslike game to discover things about her past, while also uncovering why the disease is happening in the first place.

Even with the ambiguity, I found the plot enthralling at times. It has an air of mystery as it leads you from zone to zone, and you realize why the Feathering occurred. Of course, you’ll have to dig deep into some items’ descriptions and read notes scattered across the map to grasp the lore behind it all thoroughly. And while it isn’t the most groundbreaking narrative, I enjoyed it. It got even better as I followed some of the quests that many NPCs gave me. Still, there were a few things I didn’t like about my first 37-hour journey.

You’ll get many quests as you meet new characters, and like other soulslike games, these progress after beating a boss or reaching a new area. However, progressing some quests was a bit frustrating due to the lack of guidance. Now, hear me out. I love that soulslikes never hold my hand. I enjoy immersing myself in their worlds and figuring out where to go without a quest marker. Unfortunately, I failed many quests because one zone showed me there was an NPC waiting to talk to me, and even as I explored the whole area, I never found them, thus making me fail a quest as I beat a new boss.

While I think the lack of a map in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is great, a way to track NPCs would improve the questing aspect. Another feature that would make the whole experience even better, speaking from a lore perspective, would be an encyclopedia of sorts. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers throws dozens of complicated terms at you on top of the huge cast of characters. Having a way to track all of that would make the plot feel easier to digest for some players. Overall, it was a great experience, and while I have no idea how I obtained my first ending, I’m eager to work on the rest to see how different they are.

One of the Deadliest Soulslikes Of Recent Memory

Often, the story aspect isn’t the main selling point of any soulslike. All we want is to fight challenging foes and face them more than 20 times until we can finally beat them. Yet, creating challenging enemies and memorable boss fights is something not many games can do. In that regard, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers shines intensely.

As another game of the genre, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has all the enemy types you can imagine. There’s your cannon fodder soldiers, a few annoying dogs, zombie-like creatures, six-legged monsters that spit poison, two-headed women with magic attacks, you get the gist. In truth, the variety is fantastic, but the real highlight is not the number of enemies, but the quality of them. Even the simplest and weakest enemy can ruin your day if you don’t learn their moves. Almost all foes have erratic attacks that remind me of a few Bloodborne foes with delayed actions that throw you off balance. Of course, there are also a few annoying ones that I tried to avoid. But overall, the combat design is terrific.

Furthermore, the boss fights are top-notch both in design and mechanics. Looking at recent soulslikes, a few went a bit too far in making boss fights difficult. One example that comes to mind is The First Berserker: Khazan. Some encounters were unbeatable unless you had a specific build or didn’t mind spending three hours facing the same boss. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is still pretty challenging. I’d say it lands at Lies of P levels of challenging. Still, it is so engaging because it gives you a lot of things to counter certain bosses.

For instance, there is one giant bandit boss in the game. The tutorial clearly states that some foes have specific weaknesses. Usually, some human enemies who wear metal armor are weak to lightning. For that fight, I swapped my spells for everything that did lightning damage, and lo and behold, I was able to finish the encounter a bit faster. That’s after dying to the enemy a dozen times, but the point is that I beat it. The same happened with bosses that applied different status effects.

It’s the first time in my gaming life where I’m encouraged to try different armor loadouts to raise my status resistances, so I can survive a fight. Previously, other games made this something optional, but Wuchang: Fallen Feathers rewards both the preparation and execution aspects of an encounter.

A Plethora of Systems

So far, I’ve described things that any other soulslike game has. So, what’s the big differentiator here? Well, there’s not one, but many things that make Wuchang: Fallen Feathers stand out. At first, the systems feel overwhelming and a bit confusing. But once you get the grasp of it, you’ll see the depth of the combat system to its fullest.

The most significant feature is Skyborn Might. By performing specific actions, such as executing a perfect dodge or hitting an enemy an “x” amount of times, you’ll get a stack of Skyborn Might. This resource lets Wuchang cast weapon skills and even spells, and it was my favorite mechanic of the game. There’s no magic bar you need to refill with a flask or other items. If you want to use magic, you need to play aggressively, and I loved that. I ran with a hybrid build, combining melee attacks with spells, and it was so great to pull everything off. I would attack an enemy two to four times to generate Skyborn Might and then cast spells from afar. In truth, this build felt a bit OP by the end, but not in a way that trivialized most encounters.

Beyond the Skyborn Might gimmick, there are a lot more mechanics that players will want to learn to make the most of the combat. For starters, each weapon has unique mechanics in combat. For instance, dual blades have the Clashing system, which reduces the damage of an enemy’s attack if you hit them at the same time they attack you. Spears generate a different resource that then converts into Skyborn Might. Shortswords can generate Skyborn Might over time, and so on.

And if you thought that was the end of it, that’s only the beginning. Wuchang can temper her weapons with specific items to grant them temporary effects, such as fire damage or even leeching attacks. Also, there’s a way for you to equip stone-like items called Benedictions that provide you with passive bonuses. Some of these items even come as a set, and equipping all three will give you an even better bonus.

I could go on and on talking about the systems, but I would spoil the whole thing for you. Yet, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers feels rewarding at all times. Be it a new spell, armor set, or weapon, everything feels impactful. I even found myself using a lot of the items you obtain in the world, such as throwing daggers, which isn’t something I do in other soulslikes. Still, my only gripe is that some of these systems can be confusing at first. While you can consult all of them in the game’s tutorial section, the terminology might throw some people off, but only at first.

Customization at Its Finest

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers also embraces the customization aspect to levels I had not seen in a soulslike at the time. Usually, I get a bad case of restartitis in games like Elden Ring. I see all these build possibilities and can’t help but reset my build constantly. However, that has a few downsides. You need to invest in new armor, upgraded weapons, and so on. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers makes this even more approachable by removing the cost of resetting a skill tree and also placing stat and weapon upgrades inside the skill tree.

Let’s say you want to focus on longswords only. You can open up that skill tree and invest your points in stat upgrades, such as Strength and Agility. This skill tree also houses the nodes to upgrade a weapon. There’s no need to go to a smith or NPC to improve one specific longsword, by the way. But what if you want to try a different weapon or roll with two? You just open your skill tree and remove the skill points you invested. And guess what? You can do that for weapon upgrades, too. Do you want to improve your shortswords, but you’re afraid you’ve lost your materials? You get them back, too. This is an interesting and flexible approach to build-crafting and one I wish more games would adopt. Players should be free to experiment without being punished when spending materials.

Gameplay customization aside, the fashion aspect of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is fantastic. It even rivals that of Stellar Blade in some ways. If you’re looking for some fan service armor sets, there are plenty in the game. Additionally, the game allows you to customize your outfit without altering the armor you’re wearing. As soon as you start, you have a “transmog” system, which lets you change the appearance of every single armor piece. You might be wearing the heaviest armor in the game, but you can make it look like Wuchang’s iconic outfit or something else entirely. I’m also glad you can do this on the fly without having to head to a shrine to edit your look. And, if you’re not a fan of the fan service, there’s a reserved option that removes the “spicy” look.

An Immersive Approach to Exploration

One last thing that deserves a mention is the map. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers takes a semi-open world approach to its areas. You start in a temple that slowly leads you to a forest, then to a village, and then to a larger temple. However, what I liked most about the design is the exploration aspect. For me, nothing will ever beat Bloodborne when it comes to exploring. Still, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers emulates that feeling of being in a huge city that just opens up the more you delve into each of its zones.

To give you an example, once you finish the first area, which is huge, a new one opens up in the underground. Then, you keep going and find a temple that focuses on vertical exploration. After that, you’re thrown into a huge forest where it is easy to get lost. Also, there are no markers or a map in the game, so you need to remember some landmarks or leave glowing stones behind to track your steps. I must admit that I got lost many times and missed a few bosses and objectives. But that’s the charm of the genre, at least in my eyes. A good soulslike map is almost like an optical illusion. You think it is small, but then you realize there are four optional paths you can take that lead to even more routes or hidden bosses.

Sadly, it comes at a price, and that is a loss of performance. Despite my PC exceeding the recommended specifications, I experienced significant fluctuations in the framerate. At times, I would hit solid 100 FPS, but then, it would drop to 40 and oscillate between that and 70, and then 100. It was distracting. The game definitely looked beautiful at every turn, but my PC struggled to keep a steady framerate, and my fans were working overtime even at medium settings. There was a large update during the review period that fixed some of these issues. However, I ended up locking the framerate to 60 to make it more stable. The silver lining is that, even at the lowest settings, the game looks gorgeous. Still, it needs some optimization tweaks to make everything feel as smooth as intended.

Last but not least, and this is a petty gripe of mine, the location of shrines and bosses. I’m all for shrines or checkpoints being far from one another. Having these safe places spread across the map makes you play more carefully. However, when it comes to boss rooms, the norm should be having the shrine outside of the arena. In many cases, the last checkpoint required an elevator ride or going through a large open area to reach the boss again. If you’re in a game where you only face a couple of times, that’s fine. But this is a soulslike, where we spend dozens of times trying to beat a boss. Having the checkpoint outside of the boss room makes things more enjoyable and makes the encounters feel less tedious.

A Cut Above the Rest

Ultimately, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is the soulslike surprise of the year, and the best of the genre in 2025. However, it’s not without its flaws. While I love how immersive and unguided exploration is, you can easily fail many quests without knowing why. Additionally, on PC, performance requires some improvements to maintain a steady framerate. Other than that, the issues I encountered were minor, and all of them pertained to technical matters. I experienced zero bugs or glitches in my almost 40-hour first playthrough.

With FromSoftware still being the staple of the genre, it is always great to see a game that understands the formula and adds its own ingredients to make it unique. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is the most fun non-FromSoftware game I’ve played since Lies of P, and I must say I enjoyed it even more. I only hope we’ll see more of Wuchang in the future or see Leenzee repeat the formula for other soulslikes, because the studio has struck gold with it. It only needs a bit of polish to be outstanding.

Review copy provided by the Publisher.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers (PC Reviewed)

8.5 Great!

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is one of the best non-FromSoftware soulslike games out there, that brings engaging mechanics and embraces player freedom above all. Even with some minor performance issues, it stands out as the biggest soulslike surprise of 2025.