Shadows of the Blade hands-on: the wuxia-punk world and its combat rhythm

After finishing a first playthrough in nearly 40 hours, the author calls Shadows of the Blade the most satisfying single-player action wuxia game in recent years. The piece covers its wuxia-punk art, blue and red attack defense timing, and weapon, accessory and soul-forging builds, while noting unintuitive map guidance, flat text and a few bosses whose mechanics feel disconnected. On an RTX 4060 Ti at high settings it mostly held around 60 fps, and the build played was a pre-release version without the day-one patch.