Phantom Blade Zero Summer Game Fest Hands-On Impressions – Beautiful and Stylish

As one of the hardest demo appointments to get into at Summer Game Fest's Play Days, we were excited to get hands-on with a quick thirty-minute demonstration of Phantom Blade Zero. Hardcore action titles such as this can have such a different vibe between watching someone else play the game during an online stream versus being able to pick up a controller and play for yourself. It was during Summer Game Fest 2024 that we finally got a brief taste of the Wuxia action players can look forward to in Phantom Blade Zero, a title that needs no introduction nor experience with the studio's prior titles as this is intended to be a prequel to the other Phantom Blade titles.

Draped in a bleak and muted aesthetic, the villages and temples of Phantom Blade Zero are secondary to the player character and the multi-faceted combat. The demo opens with a quick tutorial, running through the basics of traversal from jumping, crouching through narrow openings, and sprints before stumbling across a lone enemy that’s the perfect punching bag to serve as a tutorial to the combat. S-Games reiterated that they don’t want to be considered a Soulslike title. Instead, one of the developers mentioned that they’re bringing back the classic “combo-driven traditional action into a Souls map” and how it’s a fusion of the two archetypes. There’s a cinematic Wuxia style to the combat that will leave players quite surprised as they learn how to take off their Souls blinders and approach Phantom Blade Zero with new eyes.

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Rather than the simplified swordplay of your typical Soulsborne title, where R1 might only have a couple of standard hits before repeating the cycle, Phantom Blade Zero instead leans into its roots as a character action title. Combos are driven through strings of Square and Triangle presses, chaining together in 'Sha-Chi' combos meant to whittle down the enemy’s defenses and break their