A stone-cold banger: Black Myth – Wukong reviewed

Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is set much later. Sun Wukong is locked in a stone egg and you take command of a monkey warrior – the Destined One – in search of the magic objects which will revive him.  

Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA blockbuster game to come out of China, and it’s what I believe the young people call a stone-cold banger. The graphics are immaculate and the gameplay – which has you pilot your fighty monkey through a series of landscapes, giving random demons what-for with your staff – is extremely moreish. Its combination of fluid combo-building combat, snap spell-casting and character customisation reminded me of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which I consider high praise. 

There’s a good deal of gathering and crafting to be done to upgrade your character, and it includes some more free-roaming sections along its linear path, but the heart of the game is combat. The learning curve, be warned, is quite steep: you are destined, among other things, to get slapped silly. If you don’t get the hang of dodging, no amount of button-mashing will prevent you being handed your monkey ass by that mini-boss with the whacking great halberd. 

But it’s also forgiving: you respawn good as new at the last shrine (shrines let you fiddle with your character and buy handy goodies) and have another bash. The nature of Monkey, as readers will need no reminding, is irrepressible.