It’s been a while since I’ve played an action game with combat as good as Phantom Blade Zero. Unlike many modern action titles which borrow a few too many elements from From Software’s rulebook, developer S-GAME wisely chose to pave its own path, creating some of the most frenetic, brutal and stylish moment-to-moment combat that I simply could not put down even after a couple dozen hours. Where its story may not grip you, rest assured its gameplay will.



Phantom Blade Zero is a wuxia action game with light role-playing elements. You assume the role of Soul, an elite assassin for a powerful shady organisation known as the Order. However, when Soul is killed and framed for the murder of the Order’s patriarch, he’s given a second chance at life by a mysterious entity and now has a set number of days to prove his innocence, unravel a deeper conspiracy, and clash with the Order’s members.



That’s the gist of Phantom Blade Zero’s story because from here on, most of the plot is unravelled through codexes, pages dotted around environments, and scattered notes. It’s your job to piece everything together as the story progresses, which brings me to the game’s one and only minor misstep. While this mechanic works in From Software’s Soulslike games because those titles are so lore-dependent and intentionally fractured, Phantom Blade Zero attempts to tell a much heavier story filled with twists and turns. By design, this scattered approach to unravelling the game’s plot works against it sometimes. It’s hard to get attached to what’s going on when you’re bombarded by names, terminology, and plot advances that might make little sense if you missed some crucial notes.

Likewise, cutscenes may play out that sometimes fail to get you emotionally invested in what’s happening because Phantom Blade Zero trusts players to figure things out for themselves, maybe to a fault. It doesn’t help that fragments of vital stories are hidden or difficult to come across on your journey, so you can quickly get detached from the narrative if you miss them. Luckily, the latter half of the game brings the narrative back into focus but for the most part, it might be easy for the game’s story to get completely lost on players initially.



Once the story is pieced together, I think it’s actually good for what it is. It’s not a tale we haven’t heard before, and some might immediately draw comparisons to older martial arts films with similar plots, but it works in keeping players invested, at least towards the back half of the game. That said, I can forgive most of these grievances because the narrative framework is just a backdrop to the true heart and soul of Phantom Blade Zero: its combat.

Phantom Blade Zero’s combat explodes on-screen with confident style, energetic bursts of action, and clashing of swords that never stopped being impressive and bonkers.

Taking some heavy inspiration from films like Jet Li’s Hero - with Donnie Yen providing supervision on the game’s movement and choreography - Phantom Blade Zero’s combat explodes on-screen with confident style, energetic bursts of action, and clashing of swords that never stopped being impressive and bonkers. Rather than trade blows and carefully wait for openings, S-GAME’s design philosophy rewards an extremely aggressive playstyle. With two light and heavy attacks, Soul can string together combos that collide with opponents, even as they’re attacking. It’s up to the player to deduce the right, very tight timing to parry, counter, and retain an aggressive, fast offence. Playing the game with a patient, defensive Soulslike mindset is probably going to get you swiftly killed. You have to detach from that way of playing and get on board with Phantom Blade Zero’s flow because once you do, it’s some of the most rewarding combat you’ll ever experience.



Soul can be equipped with a variety of weapons, some smaller and faster while others are larger, but even the largest weapons are swung around with surprising speed and agility. How this ties into the frenetic velocity of gameplay is the fun part. Most weapons encourage a faster pace to be used effectively. The combat is simple enough to wrap your head around but also complex enough that it incentivises you to get good at learning the ebb and flow of certain weapons and combos. This leaves plenty of room for experimentation, especially with Soul being able to carry two primary weapons and two secondary weapons. Switching between weapons can be done seamlessly in a combo, but there’s a cooldown between switching to prevent spamming, meaning every swing and carefully-timed switch-out has to be purposeful and planned. A resource called sha-chi also dictates your “stamina” usage, and instead of being directly tied to a dwindling bar, the metre can be replenished with continuous attacks or weapon switches to land more devastating heavy blows. This works in perfect synergy with the game’s fast, aggressive pace.



Special attacks called Power Surges can be unleashed depending on the weapon, and they’re some of the most agile, hard-hitting attacks in the game. They can be flexibly integrated into combos, resulting in the combat’s great forward momentum where you never feel like any enemy or boss fight is too overwhelming with a little creativity and mindful knowledge of the tools at your disposal.

The combat is simple enough to wrap your head around but also complex enough that it incentivises you to get good at learning the ebb and flow of certain weapons and combos.

On that note, the boss fights in Phantom Blade Zero are stacked to the brim. For the most part, fights against larger-than-life foes or monstrous creatures are carefully reserved for the spectacle. While there are some excellent cinematic moments that arise from the bigger boss encounters, the thrill ultimately comes from the human-sized, faster foes who provide the greatest challenges in the game. They can easily match your speed and hostility, and that’s where the combat can become extremely intense and heart-pounding, constantly (and I mean constantly) keeping you on your toes. I haven’t felt a rush like this since playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and that should say a lot.



It’s difficult to label Phantom Blade Zero’s combat as anything other than, well, flawless. This coming from a fan of martial arts films, particularly its inspirations like Hero, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and The Grandmaster - it put a huge smile on my face and I got so absorbed into it, it carried me through to the game’s completion at around the 30-hour mark (that’s also missing a bunch of side content while mostly beelining the main path).

On the technical side of things, I initially began playing Phantom Blade Zero on PC and quickly realized this might not be the most optimal way to experience it. Even with a modest RTX 5060 and plenty of tinkering with the settings, I still experienced choppy framerates at times and an annoying save bug that forced a reinstall. I eventually switched over to PS5 Pro and finished it there, encountering little to none of the same problems I had on PC. On its merits, I’ll consider the PS5 version of the game as the one I’m mainly basing this review on, but it should be known that S-GAME will need a few more patches and updates to bring the PC version up to scratch.



Presentation-wise, Phantom Blade Zero is a gorgeous game. Appropriately dark and grim with washed out colours, the use of more vibrant hues and colour palettes really stands out as a result. It has a very distinctive art style that meshes well with its dark fantasy world. The voice acting is also terrific across the board and S-GAME shows plenty of passion for its wuxia roots combined with dark fantasy, horror, and steampunk. It’s a collision of styles that works wonderfully.

I can confidently say that Phantom Blade Zero is one of the best action games of the decade. The combat is outstanding, rewarding a far more aggressive playstyle than I expected. Thanks to extraordinary motion capture work and a reverence for martial arts cinema and Chinese history and mythology, it creates a splendid fusion of styles and inspirations that gives it a distinct identity. Where the story stumbles, the gameplay picks it right back up and I think players itching for a thrill ride unlike any other will definitely find that Phantom Blade Zero delivers thrills in spades.

PS5/PC Review codes provided by S-GAME