Phantom Blade Zero Opens at 88 on Metacritic With Combat Praise and Story Doubts

Phantom Blade Zero holds an 88 on Metacritic from 43 PC reviews, the day before S-Game's first AAA game reaches PlayStation 5 and PC on 29 October 2026. The PlayStation 5 version sits at 87 from 37 reviews. On the PC page, 42 of the 43 reviews are positive, one is mixed and none is negative.

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The average says less than the range does. IGN gave the game 9/10. Eurogamer gave it 60/100. Neither review disputes that the fighting is excellent. What separates them is the material between the fights, and how heavily a thin story should weigh against strong combat.

What the 88 is made of

The rest of the spread clusters above 80. Gamekult scored it 80, ComicBook 90, Gamersky 98, SECTOR.sk 90, Saudi Gamer 100 and TierraGamer 87. GameSpot published a positive review without a numeric score in the excerpt available, and Game Informer's Wesley LeBlanc filed a review in progress containing the most enthusiastic sentence in the reviews cited here: "It is one of the best action games I've ever played, and I'm shocked to be writing that."

That sentence, from a review with no final score, is a useful reminder of what an 88 is. It averages judgements from people who played the same pre-release build under the same embargo and came away with different weights for the same parts. The combat sits at the top of nearly every one of those judgements. The story sits at the bottom of several.

The distribution matters as much as the mean. Forty-two positive reviews against one mixed is a consensus with a single holdout, not a divided reception. That explains why the 88 reads stronger than the two-point gap to the PS5 score suggests, and why Eurogamer's 60 stands out. It is arguing against a body of opinion, not giving voice to one.

The embargo lifted on 25 and 26 October, which gave buyers three or four days to read before launch. That is a normal window for a large release and a short one for a game with a 30-hour campaign and a story that reviewers were only partly allowed to describe. Most people deciding on 29 October will have seen the number and not the argument behind it.

The combat nobody argues about

Phantom Blade Zero asks for two defensive answers and punishes the wrong one. Red attacks are dodged, blue attacks are parried, and the rhythm between them is the game. Bosses run through multiple stages with a checkpoint at each phase, so a long fight does not send you back to its opening. Kotaku's review roundup describes the result as arcade-style rather than Soulslike, which fits the checkpointing: the game wants you to reach the next stage of a fight, not rehearse the first one.

The weapon count is the part reviewers keep returning to. There are 30 weapons, all collectible and upgradable, and two can be equipped at once. Each has its own moveset. That last detail is what turns a loadout into a decision, because the second slot changes which attacks are available, not how much damage they do. A 30-hour game built on a single moveset would flatten out; this one keeps handing the player a different way to fight.

GameSpot's review makes the case in prose. "Some games might have better combat, but few can match Phantom Blade Zero's style," Richard Wakeling wrote. That is a narrower claim than Game Informer's, and a harder one to argue with. Style is the part of the game that survives the story complaints, and it is the part every positive review describes in the same terms: timing, weapon variety, the look of a fight in motion.

The Sekiro comparison turns up more than once. Eurogamer's Emma Kent, in a line carried by Kotaku's roundup, described the game as "kinda like high-octane Sekiro", which is accurate about the parry timing and looser about everything else. Sekiro built its fights around a single blade and a posture meter. Phantom Blade Zero hands the player 30 weapons and asks for the right defensive answer to a colour cue. The comparison is useful for calibrating difficulty and less useful for predicting whether the game holds up over 30 hours. The variety that keeps it interesting is the thing Sekiro chose to do without.

The story is where the scores split

Soul, the protagonist, has 66 days left to live. What follows is a story of betrayal and revenge, and it is the part of the game critics describe with the least enthusiasm. IGN's Travis Northup wrote that the story "mostly plays it extremely safe", a line Kotaku quotes in its roundup. Other reviews call the narrative confusing and point at a disjointed delivery. Polygon is warmer on the fiction than most. GamesRadar ends up positive on the game and mixed on the ending. Eurogamer's 60 is the lowest score in the set, and its stated reasons are balance and quality issues rather than the story alone.

There is a reporting problem inside all of this. Reviewers were asked not to discuss some story elements, so every published assessment of the narrative is partial by construction. That does not make the criticism wrong. It does mean the story's best case has not been made in public, and the worst case has been made only in general terms. The 88 therefore averages judgements formed without the full picture, as any pre-release aggregate does.

The 66 days are a structural promise. The game tells you at the start that its hero is dying and that the clock is running, and a countdown like that sets an expectation about pace and consequence. Reviews that call the delivery disjointed are describing a gap between that premise and what the individual scenes do with it. Whether the gap comes from the script, the direction or the way the story is unrolled across chapters is not something the reviews cited here settle.

"Some games might have better combat, but few can match Phantom Blade Zero's style." — GameSpot, review, October 2026

The split matters beyond one game. An action game can survive a weak plot if the fighting carries the hours, and most of these reviews say the fighting does. Eurogamer's dissent is that the balance and the quality of the surrounding material pull the whole thing down anyway. Both positions put the combat at the centre. What they disagree about is how much it can carry.

Fifteen years and two RPG Maker games

Kotaku's October feature puts the project at 15 years and two RPG Maker games before this release. S-Game is a Chinese studio, and Phantom Blade Zero is its first AAA production, built in Unreal Engine 5. The studio calls the setting "kungfupunk". A studio reaching this scale for the first time is making two bets at once: that it can build a modern action game at console quality, and that an audience outside China will turn up for a martial-arts story told on its own terms.

Donnie Yen is attached to the project, according to IGN's release-time report. The sources describe him as featuring in the game rather than as its lead, and none of the reviews cited here treats his presence as the reason to play it.

Thirty hours or fifty, depending on who is counting

Length estimates disagree by about 20 hours. GamesRadar's Luke Kemp reached the final boss in 30 to 35 hours with an entire region still unexplored. ComicBook reported roughly 50 hours and 197 deaths. Both can be true at once: one measures a route to the credits, the other a route plus the content it skipped. The death count belongs to a single player and should be read that way.

The phase checkpoints shape that range. A boss that restarts at its second stage costs less time per failure than one that sends you to the beginning, which is one reason a game with demanding parry timing can take 35 hours for one player and 50 for another. It also means the difficulty conversation around Phantom Blade Zero is about tuning and rhythm more than endurance. Reviewers describe learning a fight, not surviving one.

Caveats

• The build buyers get is not the build critics played. Kotaku reports that glitchy level geometry and occasional framerate problems some critics hit may have been improved in a major pre-release patch. Launch-day performance on PS5 and PC is unverified.
• The date is not consistent across outlets. Kotaku's roundup gave 28 October. Metacritic and IGN list 29 October, and this article uses the later date.
• The aggregate is a snapshot. The 88 and the 87 were read on 28 October 2026 and will move. Platform counts differ, and the PC sample is the larger one.
• "Best action game" is a reviewer's phrase, not an award. Game Informer's line comes from a review in progress with no final score.
• Sales are unknown. S-Game had published no unit figures or sales expectations as of 28 October.

What the launch adds

The metascore will take on late reviews in the days after release, and the PS5 figure has fewer reviews behind it, so it will move more easily than the PC average. The launch build will also answer the question the reviews cannot: whether the pre-release patch fixed the framerate and geometry problems that Kotaku flagged, or merely moved them. Buyers on both platforms will play a build that none of these reviews describes as the launch version.

Then there is the commercial question. S-Game has spent 15 years reaching this point, and an 88 gives a first AAA release room to find an audience. It says nothing yet about whether one exists. The first public signal will come from charts and from whatever the studio chooses to announce, not from critics.

Cover image: Phantom Blade Zero gameplay screenshot courtesy of S-Game.