Lately, more and more fans have been testing the power of their online voices. If they think something is wrong with a game, movie, show, or book, they will band together to downvote it into oblivion. This process, known as “review-bombing,” has been used for both good and bad causes. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is the latest product to feel the review bomb burn.
Wo Long was recently released and has already received glowing critical reviews. Outlets such as God is a Geek and Destructoid praised the game, but that praise obviously hasn’t stopped some of the game’s earliest users from review-bombing it into oblivion. Mind you, disagreements between critics and gamers are nothing new. Games such as The Last of Us Part 2 and Deadly Premonition are the poster children of these disparate opinions. That being the case, one can’t help but wonder what Wo Long did to spawn such disagreements. The answer lies in the platform you play it on.
To put it bluntly, audiences despise the PC port of Wo Long. Reviews for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions are decent to great and largely only marred by the occasional “this game is too hard” 1-star review. Not bad, all things considered, but reviews on Steam are “Mostly Negative” and trending downward. You don’t have to read far into the reviews section to figure out why. According to most Steam users who played the game, Wo Long’s performance is shockingly bad.
The most helpful review on the site (written by a Steam user known as cashews) provides an in-depth illumination of Wo Long’s problems, many of which can be traced back to the game’s woeful keyboard and mouse controls. According to cashews, the mouse utilizes controller dead zones. So unless you whip your mouse around, the camera won’t move at all. Even upping the mouse sensitivity doesn’t seem to fix the issue. And the keyboard layout isn’t any better. Soulslike games almost always play better on a controller, but more and more fans expect viable mouse and keyboard options. Besides, controls are hardly Wo Long‘s only problem.
Simply put, Wo Long’s PC performance issues are a nightmare. According to many gamers, including reviewers like ACG, the PC version of the game stutters a lot and is prone to crashes and bugs. These glitches include black screens during cutscenes and an occasional lack of sound, but the worst bug of all causes the game to run in slow motion. Cashews theorizes that the PC port of Wo Long runs at different speeds determined by dividing a player’s current framerate by the max framerate they set in the options menu. So, if you set the game to run no higher than 120 fps, but it runs at 90 fps, Wo Long will chug at 0.75x speed. That’s a death sentence for the game since its combat relies on proper timing. Given the general consensus of Steam players, Wo Long has trouble keeping a steady framerate, and other players have corroborated this bug’s existence.
Anyone who wants to play the PC port of Wo Long should set their max FPS at the lowest setting regardless of their setup. Or better yet, wait until Team Ninja patches this game-breaking bug. Sadly, many of those bugs were also present in the game’s demo, though some hoped that they would be polished in time for the final release.
Fans who hoped that Team Ninja had learned from the mistakes of its previous PC ports, including Nioh and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins, are obviously making their frustrations heard at the moment. We’ll see how long Team Ninja takes to fix this PC port this time around.