Even during one of the busiest times of the year for gaming launches, there’s always room for another title to catch your eye. When it was first revealed, Where Winds Meet immediately stood out as a free-to-play title with AAA aspirations, using Unreal Engine 5 to deliver a compelling Chinese Wuxia setting, an immense open world, and martial arts-inspired combat that’s eye-wateringly fast. On first impressions, it has the potential to be one of the winter’s biggest time sinks.
The first batch of options you’ll have gives you the expected control over the game’s difficulty and the amount of guidance you’ll have while out in the open world. It’s worth considering the immersive option, as it really cleans up the HUD, at the cost of limiting how much information you’ve immediately got to hand. You can also choose to go with a multiplayer focus or a solo-oriented adventure, with the option of joining up with other players for tougher encounters.
It’s an action-packed opening, taking control of Jiang Yun, who’s seemingly stirred up an immense hornet’s nest by killing his father. He’s also carrying a baby in a sling, though this doesn’t seem to slow down his impressive abilities in the slightest. After meeting up with a companion, you’re embroiled in a QTE-infused horse chase, with enemies coming at you from all sides, and slow-motion arrow-time bow shots to see them off.
It’s delivered with bags of style, and when you arrive at a set of ruins in the middle of nowhere, you’re greeted by The Void King, a hulking, scythe-wielding foe who immediately makes you feel outmatched.
Combat is swift and precise, with a great sense of flow. Timing is key, mixing up blocks, parries – called deflections here – and dodges to outwit and evade your opponents, before leaping in with regular sword thrusts or Mystic Arts. The timing window for deflections is pretty intuitive, but you can turn on Assist Deflection if you want a bit of slow-motion assistance, albeit at a cost to your Insight Points.
Straight away, it’s clear that it’s not intended to be as punishing as a Souls-like, though the multi-stage attacks and huge sweeping blows that The Void King punishes you with certainly give you a very real sense of danger. You’re equipped with 10 health flasks, though, and as long as you don’t think you’re invincible, you’ll probably make it through this early test unscathed.
Time passes, and it’s now that you can create your character, taking on the role of the baby from Jiang’s sling. You can draw from a pool of ready-made presets, broken up into Elegant or Realistic categories, and then alter them to fit your tastes. There’s a full suite of customisation options, from face shape to a huge array of make-up options, to bring your character to life, or you can delve into customising your character via a separate app or web portal, importing the data to save you some time.
Visually, there’s been a lot of care and attention put into Where Winds Meet, from the detailed character models through to the often-beautiful locations. There are some signs of the game’s free-to-play nature that hang around though, and the English voice dub isn’t the strongest I’ve ever heard. To be honest, I’d leave it on the native language with English subtitles to get the full effect of the game’s setting and tone, as it’s a much more authentic experience.
Once you’ve created your character, you’re assaulted by tasks, character names and locations that you’ve got no clue about. It certainly looks incredible though, and this is a world begging to be explored. There’s an initial, very frustrating, archery test to take part in, that doesn’t work how you expect it to, but you can paper over that since it’s a very small component of what’s going on in Where Winds Meet.
There’s plenty of interesting ideas at play, from learning martial arts moves from the natural wildlife – your first Mystic Art comes from mimicking a bear – to listening in on the conversations of different encampments before you put them to sword. Overall, it feels closer to an Assassin’s Creed-style open world than a Souls-like, and the regular combat is certainly more akin to that as well.
You wander the open world, drawn here and there by pockets of enemies, who are often guarding some helpful loot, while the main mission thread takes you wherever you really need to be. It’s a decidedly traditional take on the open-world, but if roaming huge maps and tootling about is for you, Where Winds Meet is staking a compelling claim for your time.
A lot of the Free to Play aspects seem to revolve around customisation, with the most visually exciting clothing all locked behind a cavalcade of tasks, sets and the like. It’s reminiscent of Infinity Nikki, and just as there, it’s the main action that will draw you in, with the hope that you’ll want to stump up a bit of real-world money for a cape that really speaks to you. As business models go, I can get on board with it, just as long as the game itself delivers on the promise that our early hands-on has given.
There are some rough edges, but this is still Early Access, and the clear thing about Where Winds Meet is that it doesn’t feel too dissimilar from a full-priced title. I’m interested in the world, and the combat feels really good once you’ve got a handle on the timing. I’ll certainly be delving in further when it launches here in the West on the 14th of November for PS5 and PC.
