Phantom Blade Zero reviews are in: fantastic combat, flat story

Phantom Blade Zero, the martial arts action RPG from Chinese studio S-GAME, is out now on PS5 and PC, and the reviews say the wait was mostly worth it. As of launch week it sits at 88 on Metacritic and a 91 average on OpenCritic, with every critic in one roundup recommending it.

What it is

You play Soul, an assassin with a tainted heart that only keeps him alive for 66 days, which gives the whole thing a ticking-clock feel. The setting leans hard on classic wuxia stories: swordsmen, secret orders, rooftop duels. You get more than 30 primary weapons and over 20 special Phantom Edges to mix into your style.

What critics love

The combat, almost unanimously. VGC gave it an 80 and called the fighting among the quickest and showiest in the genre. Boss fights revolve around a stagger meter called sha-chi; fill it and you get a long window to unload combos. Red special attacks have to be dodged at the last second, blue ones parried, and black-flash attacks dodged, so every fight turns into a reading test.

What they don't

The story and the levels. Reviewers call the characters bland and the stages too linear, and the lowest scores point to bugs, frame-rate drops, fuzzy quest guidance and some awkward boss arenas. A late pre-release patch fixed part of it, not all. Performance seems to depend on your setup: one reviewer saw real slowdown on PS5 Pro even with ray tracing off, another got a mostly steady 60 frames per second, and PC is reported as fairly smooth.

The Radazoid take

This is a game built by people who clearly grew up on kung fu movies and arcade beat-em-ups, and it shows in the best way. Nobody buys a game like this for the dialogue. You buy it to parry a guy three times your size and feel like a legend for about four seconds before the next one shows up.

If you've only got an hour after the kids are down, the fight-first design fits that perfectly. If bland characters and linear levels are dealbreakers, give it a few patches. And if you're on PS5 Pro, check whether the performance fixes land before you jump. I don't have thumbs, but even I want to try the parry system.