Boss fights divide critics
Phantom Blade Zero’s critics mostly love the swordplay, then describe three different boss fights. IGN found the difficulty "exactly right", Eurogamer found "a very high proportion" of the bosses spongy, and Polygon thinks the game hands you so many tools that they undermine its most important fights.
All of that sits under an 89. The 89 is OpenCritic‘s Top Critic Average, and 96% of critics recommend the game. The site lists 52 critic reviews and ranks the game in the 98th percentile of those it has scored. OpenCritic gives the release date as 29 October, for PC and PlayStation 5.
The swordplay is where the raves start
IGN’s Travis Northup, who played on PC for 50 hours, gave it 9/10 and called it "an unbelievably smooth action game filled with memorable boss fights, compelling combat, and limitless swagger". Eurogamer’s Emma Kent, also on PC, landed on 3/5 but agrees about the crowd fights: against regular enemies the weapons "feel extraordinary", and Kent likens the whole thing to "high-octane Sekiro".
The arsenal is a big part of it. Steam’s page lists over 30 primary weapons and more than 20 Phantom Edges, and the reviews say swapping between them is part of the job. IGN says the game requires it, because swapping your active melee weapon restores your posture meter. Eurogamer describes a two-weapon system where swapping gives you a fresh sha-chi bar, with a slight cooldown.
| Outlet | Score | Takeaway |
|---|---|---|
| IGN (Travis Northup) | 9/10 | "Memorable boss fights, compelling combat, and limitless swagger"; played on PC |
| DualShockers (Christian Bognar) | 9.5/10 | "Hands down the best action RPG this year" |
| TheSixthAxis (Nick Petrasiti) | 9/10 | "Spectacular, occasionally gloriously ridiculous" |
| GameSpot (Richard Wakeling) | 8/10 | "Still a fantastic game that any action aficionado should lap up" |
| GRYOnline.pl (Sebastian Kasparek) | 7.5/10 | Combat gets repetitive and exploration is "limited and dull" (English text via OpenCritic) |
| Eurogamer (Emma Kent) | 3/5 | Wonderfully fluid combat, but "balance and quality issues" dim it; played on PC |
| Polygon (Paulo Kawanishi) | Unscored | Dazzling aesthetics, but it "lacks putting trust in the player" |
One boss system, three verdicts
Northup played on the hardest difficulty and reports beating "just about every major boss fight in two or three tries", which IGN counts as a strength. One reason is that dying in a boss’s second phase puts you back at the top of that phase, not the start of the fight. IGN says that removed a lot of friction, and Eurogamer calls it "the greatest mercy of all".
Kent’s 3/5 lands somewhere else entirely. "A very high proportion of the bosses felt spongy", the review says, on the regular pathfinder setting and on wayfarer, the one meant for rampaging through the game. S-Game shipped a 67GB update two days before the embargo lifted, with changes to boss, enemy, ability and weapon stats. Kent returned to old saves and found "the sponginess remained present in several boss fights", while noting the launch build might feel a little different.
Polygon’s unscored review has a different complaint. Talismans that exploit boss weaknesses, plus red and blue flash cues for dodge and parry, mean "Boss fights end up feeling more like a staged play", writes Paulo Kawanishi. Eurogamer describes the same red-dodge, blue-parry cues as the key to breaking a boss’s guard. Gameblog’s 9/10 (OpenCritic’s English text of a French review) says the difficulty settings "can also make the game far too easy", yet warns of "occasionally poorly handled difficulty spikes", particularly with certain bosses. It’s a different argument from the one in our Control Resonant roundup, where the arguments were about the melee.
Frame rates and invisible walls on PC
Both full reviews were played on PC, and both flag rough edges. IGN says the review build ran much more steadily than the preview version Northup played a little over a month earlier, but on one map the frame rate was "consistently pretty terrible". Northup also reports dying nearly 200 times, roughly half of them from falling into pits or getting caught in the environment. Eurogamer reports "severe frame rate dips" in certain areas that seem better since the update, plus bosses hopping outside their arenas to attack from behind invisible walls. S-Game says its latest patch addressed the escaping bosses, performance and quest guidance, but Kent says it’s hard to tell whether everything is fixed, and one side-quest loop is still there.
Steam’s requirements are the developer’s targets, not measurements. Minimum is a GeForce GTX 1660 6GB or Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB with a Core i7-8700K or Ryzen 5 3600 and 16GB of RAM, aimed at 1080p and 30fps with upscaling enabled. Recommended is an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT with a Core i5-10600K or Ryzen 5 5600X, aimed at 1440p and 60fps with upscaling enabled. An SSD is required, and the page lists Denuvo as third-party DRM. None of the three full reviews publishes frame-rate figures, which is the same kind of PC caveat our Monster Hunter Wilds roundup flagged on its own 89. Eurogamer lists the PC launch as 28 October; the US Steam and PlayStation pages say 29 October.
Story is the other shared grumble. Northup calls the timeline "needlessly complex", Kent finds the narrative "pretty unremarkable" with lore dumps, and Checkpoint Gaming’s 8/10 excerpt cites "convoluted storytelling". Polygon reads the sparse exposition as deliberate: to enjoy the story, Kawanishi writes, is "to trust the process".
Our take
We think 89 is a fair summary of a game with a high ceiling and a boss problem critics can’t agree is a problem. Steam’s page also shows an 88 from Metacritic, and its user reviews read Mostly Positive from roughly 1,300 reviews when we checked.
- ✅ Buy if the dodge-and-parry loop is your idea of fun and you want a big weapon list to experiment with: IGN gives it 9/10 and DualShockers 9.5/10.
- ✅ Buy if you like exploring without map markers: IGN says it uses hand-drawn maps that only give a vague idea of your location, and Eurogamer says praise should go to the exploration.
- ❌ Wait if long boss fights wear you down: Eurogamer’s 3/5 leans on bosses it found spongy, and S-Game was still changing boss stats days before reviews went up.
- ❌ Skip if you want combat depth beyond a handful of buttons: Polygon says it "pretty much boils down to constantly pressing the same four buttons, with slight variations".
The US Steam and PlayStation pages both list the standard edition at $59.99 and the Digital Deluxe Edition at $69.99. The $10 difference buys two outfits (Wulin Legend and Blood-Steel Form), a digital art book and a digital soundtrack, which we’d skip unless the outfits appeal. If boss pacing is your dealbreaker, we’d wait for the first week of player reports on the launch build; if it isn’t, the critics’ 89 is a reasonable bet.
Sources checked 29 October 2026: OpenCritic, the IGN, Eurogamer and Polygon reviews, and the Steam and PlayStation store pages. Prices and user-review labels can change.
