Age of Wushu

Age of Wushu immerses you in a Chinese world full of villians and heroes, and you can take either role in this open PvP environment. You train your martial arts skills while advancing your own story and climbing the ranks in one of the eight schools.

Players can set up their own shop stalls anytime, which can function offline. The market gets full quickly, but unfortunately the game has problems with rendering a lot of characters and draw distance.

Dialogue with non-player characters often gives some options, some of which may affect quests. Most often, though, you just have to repeatedly click through it and start conversations multiple times to trigger quest objectives. The localization has many mistakes in it.

You'll learn and practice a multitude of kung-fu moves with different weapons. The combat works quite well and is essentially a rock-paper-scissors system. Right-clicking makes you block, which minimizes damage and can activate special effects. There are also many aerial maneuvers in the game.

Special moves are long, scenic combos, which are great to pull off and watch. However, the multitude of moves with long, confusing names are learned early on. This makes the system overwhelming fairly quickly.

There are some voiceless cutscenes that drive your narrative from time to time. It's nice to see them, but while the characters have good animations, their interaction with the environment is clunky a lot of the times.

There are three ways of increasing your skills: you select one to train at a time, and you can strengthen it passively as you play or take a moment to "Practice Martial Arts." That involves spending money to upgrade it quickly, and there's a daily limit on how much you can spend.

Another way to train is to get people together for Team Practice. It doesn't cost, but increases levels of skills faster than Passive Cultivation. It involves an animation showing all participants and requires entering button combinations. Age of Wushu encourages social play, and this is one of the ways it accomplishes it.

While the graphics are not particularly impressive, the environments are pleasant and scenic. The game definitely has a climate that's bound to appeal to fans of Chinese culture. Traveling can be long unless you teleport, which has cooldowns.