Where Winds Meet review: "Sekiro-style combat meets seemingly every videogame idea ever in this bloated but fun open-world martial arts adventure"

Where Winds Meet is a game full of good ideas. It's also full of bizarre ideas, bad ideas, and possibly every idea ever. That's what happens when you decide that your martial arts open world should also contain crime scene investigating, base building, stealth, swimming, hunting, cooking, crafting, fishing, debating, AI chatbots, endless minigames, and secrets that can only be accessed by throwing live bears at them.

It's also got a horrible UI that's harder to navigate than Gatwick airport drunk, a battle pass that costs money which keeps irritatingly advertising itself, and about four million currencies and upgrade systems to keep track of. Got all that?

So this should be a spread-too-thin overreaching mess. And it, er, occasionally is. But strong combat and a world full of character was enough to keep me enjoying Where Winds Meet. It's set in China in the 9th Century but has what you could charitably call a loose relationship with history. We're in full-on fantasy land here, with magic rife. Luckily you're more than capable of defending yourself as you're a master of martial arts. There's swordplay, a spear, a fan (yep), and even a pleasingly lethal umbrella.

Whatever you choose, this is clearly a game made by a development team who've sunk a lot of hours into Sekiro. Perfect parrying is the order of the day, though it's a lot more forgiving than FromSoftware's game. There's even a helpful prompt you can switch on that gives you approximately fifty years to press the parry button. You take far more hits, too, and it's the timing of your cooldown attacks that's actually your main concern. Every weapon has a spectacular range of special attacks for you to rain down upon your foes whenever you get an opening.

Flying daggers

It makes combat a messier, more frantic affair than Sekiro's focused do-or-die swordplay, but often visually spectacular and still very satisfying. If you're looking for an evolution of Sekiro's combat then you'd be better off with something like the outstanding Nine Sols. This is more of a loose cover version with some fun new beats.

Outside of combat there's enough minigames in here to rival WarioWare. Some are pretty standard, like a rhythm game when you play an instrument. But Where Winds Meet seems to have gone out of its way to gamify every interaction it can. You can have verbal debates with some NPCs, triggering an odd card game where you play arguments to knock down their health. By the time I'd triggered yet another minigame for NPC healing, I was starting to get sick of all these, and not in a way that a silly healing minigame could cure.

Minigame compilations are always hit-and-miss, of course, but I'd have happily taken less distractions for more focus on the essentials, like the somewhat obnoxious stealth. Being able to turn invisible in Spider-Man: Miles Morales almost broke that game's stealth. Where Winds Meet's 'solution' is that turning invisible here seems to be an inconsistent buff at best. Enemies often still spotted me without the game being clear how.

There's also a stealth takedown move that, once performed, has my character celebrate by standing up afterward, making it all too easy to blunder forward and get spotted because I'm no longer crouching. Most annoyingly of all, 'eavesdrop on private conversation' and 'crouch' are on the same bloody button. Come on, we solved some of these stealth games issues decades ago.

Frequent dungeoneering fares better, with its Tomb Raider-y traps and frankly preposterous amount of loot (if you go more than 30 seconds in this game without opening a chest, you're playing it wrong). Puzzles, however, are often too simple or have 'tutorials' that tell you exactly what to do. Not so much handholding as cradling you in its arms and rocking you to sleep while it plays the game for you.

Welcome to the punch

Things improve massively when Where Winds Meet focuses on the fighting. It loves spectacle and knows how to make a boss battle feel like you're fighting inside an exploding fireworks factory. The optional bosses you'll find on the map have real teeth, too, perfect for Soulslike veterans. Turn off the difficulty softeners and you'll find a meaty challenge here.

You can run up cliff faces, have a lovely air-dash, and a ground-pound-esque attack that can help you survive major falls. Climbing relies on a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style stamina meter, and while it's nowhere near as sophisticated, being able to hop, skip, run, and triple-jump up a mountain is great fun. Turning off so many of your fun navigation powers in certain areas is pretty cheap, however.

At least the world is varied and knows how to keep some secrets away from the map screen, making exploration rewarding. I stumbled across a burnt-down village drowning in Silent Hill-flavoured fog, and engaged in a spooky quest to discover what happened to it. Later I found a swamp soundtracked by the most sinister drumming you'll ever hear. Soon I was fighting elite monks who kept attacking me long after they'd died as I pieced together the mystery of this cursed place. I love chancing upon creepy areas like this, especially because Where Winds Meet's world is usually so joyous.

Joy! Remember that? Sekiro is obviously a favorite of Everstone Studio, but I bet the Yakuza games are too. There's a similar focus on scoundrels with hearts of gold, rich bastards who need a good kicking, and a witty script that's not afraid of sincerity. It's not as laugh-out-loud funny as vintage Yakuza – what is? – but it's still full of great lines, delivered by larger-than-life characters who are a delight to spend time with.

Horsin' around

When some of them are killed off I'm genuinely gutted because they bring so much charisma to the table. There's even a funeral scene with a moving eulogy that's only slightly undercut by the reveal that you're now suddenly playing as a horse. OK, it's completely undercut by that bonkers revelation, but I think Where Winds Meet's tonal whiplash is part of its charm.

Clearly this is a game made by talented writers and designers. So naturally someone has decided to pour a bunch of AI into it. Occasionally you'll meet NPCs that you can become 'friends' with by responding to a prompt from them in an AI chat window. E.g. Shi the poor boatman can't afford medicine and wants to talk to you about it (wouldn't he rather I just fetched him some medicine?).

They're somewhat impressive chatbots, when they don't seem to be ignoring my lines, anyway. But it's another example of weird filler that doesn't really add anything to the experience. None of the story's major characters have this option, which highlights just how superfluous it is. More power to you if you find 'talking' to NPCs like this immersive, but I just found it gimmicky.

Oh yeah, online multiplayer!

You might think this is quite far to get into a review of an online game before even acknowledging the existence of the internet. Well, that's because aside from the AI and option to call people in for help with bosses, Where Winds Meet is a substantial single-player offering in itself. You'll have no problem enjoying it solo. Head online and you'll find plenty more to do, of course, along with lots of microtransactions you can have fun explaining to your accountant.

There's a 1v1 mode which is good fun and will absolutely destroy you if you've been relying on those parry-help prompts. The other versus mode is a battle royale that 'borrows' almost as much from Fortnite as Fortnite did from PUBG. So many of the special attacks in Where Winds Meet are massive OTT-AOE-WTAF-assaults that bumping into two or more other players and deciding to get stuck in is a literal blast. It's the good kind of hectic, and a nice reminder of how strong the game is when it lets the combat take center stage. Some tutorializing would have been nice and it's not exactly original but it's a decent bit of battle royale regardless.

Boring, pacifist types will be pleased to hear that you can also enjoy a much more Animal Crossing-flavored multiplayer experience. You can play minigames together, like the fishing contests and archery-offs, which at least involves something you could legally call gameplay.

I'm much less convinced by the 'Blessing Acquisition'. This involves earning 'blessing points' by embarking in a ritual with other players. I was ready for yet another minigame, perhaps something like Just Dance. Nope! You just watch your characters flail around together as the points go up, no interaction from yourself required. I wrote this entire paragraph without picking up my controller once and then left 3000 blessing points richer. Do you consider this rubbish to be gameplay? Bless.

This is by no means a definitive 100% review of Where Winds Meet. Such a thing would likely take more hours than our species has been alive for. But this shows promise, even if it is a little too scattershot. If you're looking for a more polished and focused open-world trip to the past, you'd likely prefer heading to Japan for some Assassin's Creed Shadows or Ghost of Yotei. Where Winds Meet is goofier than both of those games combined, often winningly so. Neither Shadows nor Yotei have fights against wild geese that turn out to be masters of martial arts now, do they? Pretty, preposterous, and occasionally inspired, Where Winds Meet is an everything game that spins enough plates successfully to forgive the ones that shatter painfully on the floor.

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