With Wukong grabbing a lot of attention and being a pleasant surprise for many, I felt like I wanted to check out something else coming from the Chinese gaming industry, as I do believe the Eastern devs could start to become a lot more relevant in the near future.

Sword and fairy is a classic good vs evil/protect the chosen one kind of a story, told through a lot of dialogue... and by a lot, I mean a LOT. In fact the dialogue was so frequent that I found myself starting to just outright skip it so I could get into actually playing the game. It also lacks a lot of the subtleties of good storytelling, instead engaging in a lot of convoluted explanations of the plot or environmental information that could easily be left to the player to deduce. Now you may enjoy dialogue heavy styles of gameplay more than me, I just find myself growing impatient and wanting to actually get into combat in cutscene heavy games like this.

Be aware that the only spoken language is Mandarin, so you will be relying on English subtitles and the translations seem a bit janky at times to the point it had me chuckling to myself at some rather odd phrases that clearly didn't translate very well.

But of course the most important thing for most of us is the combat and this is where the game also falls down a bit. Combat is floaty and has no feel to it, hits dealt feel as numb as the hits you take from enemies and while there is a dodge mechanic much like Wukong, it is far less refined and satisfying as Wukong combat is. There is some swapping between characters possible in combat but like so much in this game the party aspect of combat feels half-baked and like another missed opportunity as far as adding more depth to the game and its combat.

I also felt like items gained were pointless, as collecting loot to (for example) upgrade my Spirit companion felt pointless as it didn't seem to make any noticeable difference to combat. The same with character development, I decided to do a lot of exploring in one region early on just to see if there was anything interesting to be found - there wasn't other than a few random items. After that I did a very short quest for a blacksmith character which allowed me to upgrade my sword, I did two upgrades and was advised my weapon was fully upgraded! So the blacksmith felt like a pointless and half baked addition, the same with trading with NPC's where selling and buying items felt half baked and I completely ignored it after a quick check on how it worked - so like many components of the game, it may as well have not been there at all.

I should briefly mention that while the game ran well for me, I also had a LOT of the typical Unreal Engine micro-stuttering and the game did seem to make my PC work a lot harder than it should have been, considering this isn't exactly pushing any graphical boundaries. I do have a very good PC though, so low end systems may struggle if mine is working so hard a lot of the time. Either way I liked the graphics in this game, I think it has its own charming style that makes it a pleasant world to experience - just a shame you cant explore much and what you can explore is mostly pointless.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3338586724

In summary I have to credit these devs as being very clearly competent, they had everything from traders, limited RPG elements, stealth sections and boss fights but it just isn't fully fleshed out into a fully realised product. However these guys are going to get the formula right in future games, I have no doubt. Despite initially wanting to finish this one, I finally hit a wall and felt like I had seen and heard enough (dialogue) to know I wanted to move on and play other games.

Watch this space though, as these devs are so close to getting it very right and they clearly have all the skills to make it happen.

The thing about this game is that THERE'S A LOT OF CUTSCENES. The story kinda gives off vibes like it was written by a woman, especially with the romance stuff, but honestly, I enjoyed the gameplay and plot. Each character is super engaging.

Fingers crossed for a sequel!

This game is beautiful 90% of the time. Decent story (main characters also don't make stupid decision). However, the side quests design are tedious with so many backtracking.