I went into my hands-on session with Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember expecting to hate it. That probably isn’t the sort of sentence Team Ninja wants associated with its upcoming action-RPG, but it’s an important one. I’ve never been great at souls-likes. The combination of punishing enemies, precise timing, complicated combat systems, and the possibility that something resembling an eldritch horror might annihilate me in three hits is not my idea of a fun time. Wo Long 2 initially looked like it was going to be another game determined to make me suffer. Instead, I had a surprisingly great time and walked away from my Gamescom preview eager to play more.
The sequel to 2023’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is still built around fast, demanding martial-arts combat, with deflection remaining a crucial part of surviving encounters. After my demo, I went back and played the original, and found it to be far more approachable than I remembered. However, Team Ninja has made some significant changes since Fallen Dynasty that mean I can already confidently say that Wings of Ember feels like a far superior game to its predecessor.
My problem with souls-likes isn’t necessarily that they’re difficult; it’s that they refuse to explain themselves. That’s great for gamers who enjoy throwing themselves at things repeatedly until they figure them out, but that’s not me. Wo Long 2 is more than happy to teach you its ways without holding your hand and making things trivial.
My hands-on session gave me plenty of information about its combat systems, and the tutorials are considerably more useful than simply throwing a paragraph of text at you before sending you off to your untimely death. There’s a lot to take in, but the game gradually explains how its different mechanics interact rather than expecting you to instinctively understand the entire combat system, and that made a huge difference when it came to my enjoyment.
The most notable change is that rather than following the linear design of the original, Wo Long 2 features a vast open world with plenty to discover and no “right” order to discover it all in. That change is exactly what made it click for me. Instead of progressing through one level of enemies after another, Wo Long 2 gives you far more freedom to explore its battlefields. Instead of approaching the game focusing on just surviving, I found myself wondering, “What’s over there?” and going off on short exploration quests of my own making. It’s that approach that made Elden Ring click for so many people, and in a similar vein, Nioh 3 from the same developer.
