Phantom Blade Zero Review – One of the Best Action Games of the Year

Phantom Blade Zero is easily one of the best games I've played this year. It's an action game that understands what makes this genre so enjoyable, offering fantastic combat, an impressive variety of weapons, a huge world worth exploring, and plenty of meaningful content to keep you invested. I went into it expecting a great combat experience, but what I got was something much more enjoyable than I initially anticipated.

Let's start with what I consider the game's biggest strength: its combat. It's fast, fluid, incredibly satisfying, and offers a level of variety that kept me engaged throughout my entire playthrough. There's something particularly enjoyable about how the game handles its weapons, as you're constantly encouraged to experiment with different options, discover new abilities, upgrade your favourites, and find the combinations that work best for your playstyle.

Plenty of Weapons to Experiment With

The weapon selection is genuinely impressive, featuring one-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, dual weapons, and several other weapon types, each with its own movesets, abilities, attack patterns, and approach to combat. They don't simply feel like different versions of the same weapon with slightly altered damage numbers. Switching between them can noticeably change how you approach an encounter, and that's something I really appreciated.

I personally relied on one-handed and two-handed weapons for almost my entire playthrough, as I found their combat styles the most enjoyable. However, there's enough variety here to encourage players to step outside their comfort zone and experiment.

There's also much more to combat than simply choosing your favourite weapon. Accessories, medicines, and Phantom Edges add additional layers to the system, allowing you to adjust your setup depending on the encounters ahead. Phantom Edges are particularly interesting, offering powerful abilities that can give you an advantage in combat. However, I have to admit that I didn't experiment with them as much as I expected. I eventually settled on a few favourites and rarely felt the need to switch.

Part of that comes down to their activation animations, which can take quite a while and leave you vulnerable to incoming attacks. This becomes especially problematic during boss fights, where even a small opening can be the difference between landing an attack and getting punished. I would have liked to see a little more flexibility here, as some of these abilities feel riskier to use than they should.

Challenging Bosses Without Unnecessary Frustration

Speaking of bosses, they're another important part of the experience. The game offers some challenging encounters that require you to understand enemy attack patterns, manage your timing, and make good use of your weapons and abilities.

I particularly enjoyed how certain encounters are structured, with some bosses featuring multiple phases without necessarily forcing you to restart the entire fight if you fail. It's a small but welcome design decision that makes these encounters less frustrating while still requiring you to learn and improve.

The difficulty is definitely there, but the game doesn't always punish you for making mistakes in the same way a traditional Soulslike would.

A Soulslike Experience on Its Own Terms

That brings me to something I genuinely appreciated about Phantom Blade Zero: how it approaches difficulty and some of the mechanics traditionally associated with Soulslike games. While there are similarities, I wouldn't describe the experience as a traditional Soulslike, and I actually prefer many of the decisions the developers made here.

For example, enemies don't respawn every time you die, meaning you don't have to repeatedly fight through the same groups just to reach the area where you previously fell. You also don't lose your Remnant Dust upon death, so there's no need to rush back to your previous location to retrieve your lost resources or worry about losing everything you've collected.

These decisions might seem minor, but they make a considerable difference to the overall experience. I found myself much more comfortable exploring, experimenting with weapons, and taking on difficult encounters without constantly worrying about losing progress.

And don't mistake that for the game being easy. It's absolutely not. In fact, I found it noticeably more challenging than Black Myth: Wukong, although still considerably more forgiving than a traditional Soulslike. For me, it strikes an excellent balance between the two. You still need to learn enemy patterns, improve your timing, and make good use of your abilities, but you're not constantly dealing with mechanics that punish you beyond the actual fight itself. It was the perfect middle ground.

Exploration That Never Feels Like a Chore

Exploration is another area where Phantom Blade Zero genuinely shines. The world is huge, with plenty of locations to discover, hidden areas to uncover, and different paths that encourage you to look beyond the main objective.

What impressed me most is how well the map is designed. Despite its size and the number of routes available, I never felt overwhelmed or constantly confused about where I had been. There are enough branching paths and secrets to make exploration interesting, but the level design does a good job of making the world feel interconnected and relatively easy to navigate once you've familiarised yourself with an area.

More importantly, exploration never felt like a chore. I genuinely enjoyed taking my time, checking different paths, and seeing what I could find. There's a satisfying feeling when you discover something unexpected after deciding to take a different route, and the game does a great job of rewarding that curiosity. I never felt like I was exploring simply because I needed to collect something or increase my playtime. I wanted to see what was around the next corner, and that's exactly what good level design should encourage.

Side Stories That Are Actually Worth Your Time

The side stories deserve just as much praise. There are plenty of them throughout the game, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed completing them.

One of my biggest issues with open-world and action games is how often side content becomes repetitive, with countless objectives that feel disconnected from the actual experience. Thankfully, that's not something I felt here. The side stories are meaningful, enjoyable, and offer additional context to the world and its characters. They don't feel like filler content, and some of them contribute to how the overall story unfolds.

I had a blast completing each and every one of them, and I genuinely looked forward to discovering more. It's refreshing to play a game where optional content feels like an important part of the experience rather than something developers have added simply to make the game longer.

An Interesting Story With Some Pacing Issues

The main story, however, is a little less consistent. I enjoyed it overall, but there were moments when the pacing slowed down considerably, and some scenes were honestly a pain to sit through. Not every cinematic managed to hold my attention, and there were a few occasions when I found myself waiting for things to move along so I could get back to the gameplay.

That's not to say the presentation is poor. Quite the opposite, actually. Most of the cinematics are well-made, visually impressive, and do a good job of delivering the game's atmosphere and important story moments. It's just that some sequences work considerably better than others.

Excellent Voice Acting, Frustrating Dialogue

Character interactions can also be frustrating at times. Conversations often feature long pauses between lines, with characters speaking rather slowly, and the inability to skip through certain dialogue sections makes things even more tedious.

I understand the intention behind giving certain conversations room to breathe, but the execution doesn't always work for me. There were moments when I simply wanted to move on, especially when the dialogue dragged on longer than necessary.

Thankfully, the English voice acting is surprisingly good. It never felt like an awkward dub, and the performances are convincing, with some genuinely talented voice actors bringing the characters to life. It's one of those aspects that could easily have gone wrong, but the developers handled it very well.

Performance Issues Need Attention

Unfortunately, the technical side of things wasn't quite as impressive as the rest of the experience. Playing on PS5 Pro, I encountered noticeable frame drops throughout my time with the game, along with occasional freezes that forced me to restart and resulted in some lost progress.

These weren't just minor visual hiccups that I could easily ignore. Having the game freeze completely is frustrating, particularly when you've spent time exploring or progressing through an area. For a game that feels so good to play when everything is running smoothly, these interruptions are disappointing.

Hopefully, future updates will address these issues and deliver a more consistent experience, because the technical problems are among the few things that genuinely affected my enjoyment.

Final Verdict

Phantom Blade Zero is an outstanding action game and one of my favorite experiences this year. Its fantastic combat system, extensive weapon variety, rewarding exploration, and genuinely enjoyable side stories make it an incredibly satisfying experience.

I particularly appreciate how it manages to deliver a challenging experience without relying too heavily on the frustrating mechanics commonly associated with Soulslikes. It finds a balance that worked exceptionally well for me, keeping encounters challenging while allowing players more freedom to experiment and enjoy the world.

The inconsistent storytelling, slow dialogue sequences, and technical issues prevent it from reaching perfection, but they're not enough to overshadow everything it does right.

I went into this game expecting a great combat experience, but came away appreciating so much more than that. I constantly found myself looking forward to what came next, whether it was discovering a new area, trying out another weapon, or taking on the next boss.

A fantastic action game that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Game score: 9/10

Reviewed by: Ruba Jaiousy

Reviewed On: PS5 Pro