Key Takeaways
- Phantom Blade Zero is one of the best action games on PS5 — a stunning debut from Chinese studio S-Game.
- Combat is the star: over 30 primary weapons and 25 Phantom Edges give you enormous freedom to experiment and find your style.
- The boss fights are phenomenal, with inventive multi-phase encounters that challenge you without ever feeling unfair.
- The Kungfupunk aesthetic — wuxia martial arts blended with steampunk — is visually unlike anything else available right now.
- Martial arts legend Donnie Yen influenced the game’s combat choreography, and it shows in every single fight.
- The story starts strong but grows sloppy — the game’s weakest link in an otherwise outstanding package.
- A handful of frame rate drops and technical hiccups on base PS5 stop it short of perfection.
- Metacritic 89 (PS5) | OpenCritic 91 | Our Score: 9/10
There’s a moment fairly early in Phantom Blade Zero where you lock eyes with a boss, the music shifts to something thumping and cinematic, and Soul — your assassin protagonist — starts moving in a way that can only be described as art. The weight of every sword swing, the snap of a parry, the absolutely jaw-dropping chain of techniques that follows a perfect counter — it all comes together in a way that makes you feel like the coolest person alive. This happens not once, but consistently, all the way through the game.
S-Game has been building toward this moment for nearly a decade, and Phantom Blade Zero is the result: one of the most confident, technically masterful, and visually distinct action games to hit PS5. It’s not perfect. But it’s close enough that the flaws only sting because the rest is so extraordinary.
The Story: A Strong Hook That Loses Its Footing
You play as Soul, an elite assassin serving a secretive and powerful organization known as The Order. When he is framed for the murder of its patriarch, Soul is left for dead — given a replacement heart that buys him exactly 66 days to live, just enough time to unravel the conspiracy against him and take his revenge. It’s a clean, effective setup. The ticking clock gives the whole thing a sense of urgency, and the early hours of the game lean into it well.
The world Soul moves through — the Wulin — is a rich and layered place. Eight interconnected regions, each with its own look, faction, and cast of characters pulling at rival schemes. Side quests can alter the path through the main story, choices carry weight, and S-Game has packed enough environmental storytelling and hidden detail into the world that you’ll want to explore every corner.
The problem is that the narrative writing doesn’t always keep pace with the world-building. The story starts with genuine intrigue and delivers some excellent character moments, but there are stretches in the middle where the plot buckles under its own ambition — exposition dumps, tonal whiplash, and some storytelling choices that simply don’t land with the same elegance as the combat. Multiple critics have flagged this, and it’s the most consistent note across reviews. For a game this visually and mechanically spectacular, it’s a frustrating gap.
That said, the cutscenes that do work absolutely work. They lean heavily into classic Chinese cinema — heavily stylized, over-the-top in the best wuxia tradition, dripping in atmosphere. When Phantom Blade Zero is firing on all narrative cylinders, it feels like being dropped inside a martial arts film.
Combat: The Soul of the Game
If the story is the weakest link, the combat is the reason Phantom Blade Zero has reviewers running out of superlatives. This is the best action combat S-Game has ever designed, and it’s among the best in the entire genre right now.
At its core, the system is built around two weapon types: primary weapons and Phantom Edges, the secondary tools that modify and amplify what your primary can do. The game gives you access to over 30 primary weapons and 25 Phantom Edges — swords, axes, chain weapons, ranged tools, area-of-effect instruments — all inspired by Chinese martial arts folklore and wuxia cinema. A flexible sword that can pierce defenses mid-flow. A spinning blade technique that covers you in a rotating field of destruction. A bow that lets you target weak spots during slower enemies’ recoveries. The variety is staggering, and more importantly, every single weapon feels different in a way that genuinely invites experimentation rather than just prompting you to find one combo and stick with it.
The influence of Donnie Yen — the kung fu legend who helped shape the game’s martial arts choreography — is felt in every sequence. Soul doesn’t just fight; he performs. The transitions between techniques, the snap of a parry landing at the perfect moment, the signature counter-attack (called a Brutal Move) that follows a timed deflection — it’s all handled with a level of craft that makes most action games look stiff by comparison. The game’s handcrafted animations are a particular standout: rather than leaning on motion capture for every sequence, S-Game animated many of the game’s techniques by hand to achieve fluid and cinematic results that motion capture alone can’t always deliver.
The parry and counter system deserves special attention. Landing a perfect deflection right before an enemy’s strike connects triggers a distinctive blue flash, opening Soul up for a punishing Brutal Move — a mechanic that rewards skill, creates rhythm, and turns fights into something closer to a dance. It’s deeply satisfying and the kind of system you get better at over time without the game ever making you feel stupid for struggling with it.
Crucially, Phantom Blade Zero is not a Soulslike. You don’t lose progress or items on death. Enemies don’t respawn every time you rest. The upgrade currency — Remnant Dust — can be redistributed freely, meaning there’s no penalty for experimenting with different weapons or skill builds. S-Game has been transparent about this philosophy: as a debut studio trying to establish itself globally, they wanted to make a game that challenges you without punishing you, and they’ve nailed the balance. Four difficulty options — Wayfarer, Pathbreaker, Hellwalker, and the brutal 66 Days mode — mean there’s an appropriate level of challenge for every type of player.
Boss Fights: The Highlight of the Year
If the combat is spectacular, the bosses are where Phantom Blade Zero reaches something genuinely remarkable. These encounters are inventive, visually extraordinary, mechanically demanding, and consistently memorable. Every major boss fight feels like it was designed with the same care as a setpiece from an award-winning action film.
The multi-phase boss design is a particular strength. Each fight escalates in a way that feels earned — the second phases don’t just turn enemies into damage sponges, they fundamentally change how a fight plays, forcing you to adapt mid-battle. Crucially, the game lets you restart from the second phase after you’ve cleared it once, which means you’re never grinding back through content you’ve already mastered just to get another shot at the part that’s actually challenging you. That’s a small but meaningful design decision that shows S-Game is thinking about your time.
One boss in particular — the Dancing Lion, a creature rooted in traditional Chinese lion dance — was mentioned by nearly every preview and review writer as an instant standout. It’s the kind of fight that makes you stop and think about how much work went into making it feel this good.
The Kungfupunk World: Art Direction That Demands Attention
S-Game coined the term “Kungfupunk” to describe Phantom Blade Zero’s aesthetic, and it earns the name. The Wulin is a world where traditional wuxia martial arts culture collides with steampunk machinery and body modification — warriors augmented with mechanical limbs, ancient temples fitted with industrial machinery, faction aesthetics that blend dynasties-era China with something stranger and darker. There’s genuine folk horror running through parts of it, and the whole world carries a sense of mythology that feels deep even when the story stumbles.
Visually, the game is stunning. Running on Unreal Engine 5, the environments are detailed and atmospheric, the character models are expressive, and the lighting during boss encounters in particular creates sequences that would be stunning as still images, let alone in motion. The game was designed from the ground up for PS5, and it shows — this is a showcase title in the best sense.
The soundtrack deserves a mention too. Composer Caisheng Bo has delivered something that genuinely serves the action — traditional Chinese instrumentation woven into cinematic scoring that shifts dynamically with combat intensity. During boss fights especially, the music is doing real work.
Performance and Technical Notes
On PS5 Pro, Phantom Blade Zero runs beautifully — detailed environments, elaborate character animations, and cinematic encounter design all rendered at a standard that makes the most of the hardware. On base PS5, the experience is largely solid, but not without friction. Reviewers have noted occasional frame rate drops during particularly intense combat sequences, instances of distant geometry vanishing at certain camera angles, and at least one reported crash during extended play sessions.
None of these issues are dealbreakers — they were relatively infrequent and didn’t fundamentally damage the experience — but for a game aiming at the highest tier of PS5 releases, they’re worth noting. S-Game will almost certainly patch these in the coming weeks, and the underlying experience is strong enough that a few technical rough edges don’t undermine what is otherwise an exceptional product.
Final Verdict
Phantom Blade Zero is a statement. S-Game has arrived on the global stage with one of the most visually distinct, mechanically deep, and viscerally satisfying action games in years — a game that earns comparison to the genre’s elite without borrowing their formula. The Kungfupunk world is unlike anything else in gaming right now. The combat is extraordinary. The boss fights are amongst the best of the generation. The story doesn’t always keep pace, and a few technical hiccups on base PS5 remind you this is a debut, not a legacy title. But those caveats barely dent what is, on the whole, one of the best games 2026 has produced.
If you own a PS5 and you care about action games, this is not optional.
What We Liked
- Combat system is deep, fluid, and endlessly satisfying
- Over 55 weapons with genuine mechanical distinction between them
- Boss fights are among the best of the generation
- Kungfupunk art direction is visually stunning and wholly original
- Donnie Yen’s influence is felt in every choreographed sequence
- Respectful difficulty design — challenging without being cruel
- Gorgeous soundtrack that serves the action perfectly
What We Didn’t Like
- Storytelling becomes sloppy and inconsistent in the back half
- Occasional frame rate drops and technical issues on base PS5
- Narrative ambition outpaces the writing at times
Phantom Blade Zero releases October 29, 2026 on PS5 and PC. Reviewed on PS5.
If you enjoy action-focused games, check out some of our other recent reviews and features:
