Wo Long 2: Wings Of Ember Made Me Rethink My Relationship With Soulslikes

I went into my hands-on session with Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember expecting to hate it. That probably isn't the sort of sentence Team Ninja wants associated with its upcoming action-RPG, but it's an important one. I've never been great at souls-likes. The combination of punishing enemies, precise timing, complicated combat systems, and the possibility that something resembling an eldritch horror might annihilate me in three hits is not my idea of a fun time. Wo Long 2 initially looked like it was going to be another game determined to make me suffer. Instead, I had a surprisingly great time and walked away from my Gamescom preview eager to play more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdejhi9Oew The sequel to 2023's Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is still built around fast, demanding martial-arts combat, with deflection remaining a crucial part of surviving encounters. After my demo, I went back and played the original, and found it to be far more approachable than I remembered. However, Team Ninja has made some significant changes since Fallen Dynasty that mean I can already confidently say that Wings of Ember feels like a far superior game to its predecessor. My problem with souls-likes isn…