Wuchang: Fallen Feathers shot to the top of the Steam charts with 100K players on launch day – but its UE5 issues earned it a brutal, overwhelmingly negative rating.
Despite high anticipation for Wuchang Fallen Feathers, Leenzee Games’ soulslike debut set in Ming Dynasty China, the title is now receiving mostly negative Steam reviews. And while it’s the platform’s second-best seller that reached 100,000 concurrent players on its launch day, it seems its future isn’t bright.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Hits 100K Players But Tanks With ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ Reviews
So what exactly happened? While console players primarily struggle with screen tearing, PC optimization has proven remarkably poor. Steam feedback is merciless in its enumeration of dramatic issues regarding this brand-new Soulslike performance.
As one user puts it, “Another unstable UE5 title. Why aren’t we optimizing these games properly and promoting the use of frame-rate generator and/or upscaling to fix the issue rather than making it an accessible feature (if needed)?”
Another states, “I actually kind of feel like a fool. In the current gaming landscape, I should have known better than to buy the deluxe version of a Souls-like and hadn’t even tried a demo.”
Someone even points out that they can’t beat the “shader compilation boss.”
Furthermore, players are unable to achieve a fully satisfying result even by lowering the game’s settings. It turns out, however, that Unreal Engine 5 stuttering isn’t the only problem with this release, as players are also reporting translation problems, “terrible” graphical quality and that the game is “clunky and unresponsive” even on high-end PCs. As if that weren’t enough, many voices point out the janky mechanics of its Soulslike combat, especially in boss encounters.
Although the initial overwhelmingly negative reviews have already changed to mostly negative, it’s hard to say what the future holds for this video game. In a brief statement from Leenzee Games and 505 Games, the creators emphasize that “These problems should never have occurred, and we deeply regret the inconvenience and negative experience some players are currently facing.”
Due to the growing avalanche of negative reviews, the developer has released Patch 1.3, which addresses some of the issues. However, the damage is done, and a significant share of the audience may never return to the game. At the time of writing, current player numbers have already dropped from an initial 100,000 to less than 80,000. Hopefully, the developers will soon resolve all the issues and the title will be able to re-engage its fans, similarly to what happened with Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky.