Phantom Blade Zero is Very Promising | gamescom 2024

One of the most anticipated action games of recent years was Black Myth: Wukong. Created by the Chinese studio Game Science, it conquered the Steam charts, displacing many of the most popular games from the top of the concurrent player rankings. But Black Myth: Wukong is the only AAA Chinese game in the current generation, and one swallow does not a summer make. 

Thankfully, more games are on the horizon: Where Winds Meet, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Lost Soul Aside. One of the higher-profile games of the bunch is Phantom Blade Zero, and we got to try it at gamescom.

Phantom Blade Zero is an action RPG developed and published by S-GAME, and is a part of the Phantom Blade series. Yes, you heard it right, series. Phantom Blade: Executioners is another game in the series, but it’s a relatively low-budget side-scrolling ARPG. Zero aims for a much bigger scope, being a traditional third-person character action game.

After the first incredible trailer, we didn’t really know what to make of it other than it being highly cinematic with the darker tone and more subdued colors. Right before gamescom, the developers published a gameplay trailer that shed more light on what this game aims to be. It looked no less cinematic than before, with lots of traditional Chinese swordplay and Wuxia elements, coupled with what seemed to be an unhealthy amount of QTEs. However, upon closer inspection at gamescom, where we managed to play a 30-minute demo, it turned out to be so much more.

Phantom Blade Zero takes its inspiration from many places, and as cliche as it sounds, it’s already being compared to the Souls series. But that would be very reductive and inaccurate all the same. S-GAME’s project stakes its own claim. It’s much faster than even Sekiro, with more focus on a flurry of attacks to break the enemies’ block to then deal as much damage as possible in the opened window. Dodges and parries are also very fast and are almost incorporated into your combos rather than being very flow-disrupting defensive tools.

On the show floor, I was told that Phantom Blade Zero extensively used motion capture of real martial arts practitioners. Even the huge bosses swinging around big cleaver-like swords were mocapped by someone. And it makes a difference – there’s a real crispness and clarity in the animations, however outlandish and impossible they may seem.

It’s hard to talk about the difficulty of the game after facing only a couple of the bosses, but from what the devs told me, they want the game to be more accessible than the usual Soulsborne curve. Not sure if this will take the form of difficulty modes, or if the game itself will be less challenging at its core.

An additional thing that stood out to me is the level design. When just traversing, it’s just regular narrow corridors that branch out, but the zones with enemies in them are clearly well thought out, with different alleys for approach in every single encounter.

Holistically, Phantom Blade Zero does nothing particularly groundbreaking but has enough great things going on for it that it can become a huge hit in the action RPG genre. S-GAME hasn’t revealed the release date for their project, but judging by the level of polish in this preview, it can’t be too long of a wait now.