Phantom Blade Zero Unlocks Tonight — 88 on Metacritic, One 6/10 Dissent

The biggest action game of the fall was not supposed to come from a first-timer. Phantom Blade Zero, the console debut from Chinese studio S-GAME, unlocks tonight — Wednesday, October 28 at 7 PM PT / 10 PM ET (02:00 UTC October 29, one worldwide moment) — on PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. The standard edition is $59.99. And it arrives carrying the kind of review average most studios spend a decade chasing: 88 on Metacritic, with 45 reviews counted on the game’s Metacritic page at build time, and a 91 average on OpenCritic.

The scoreboard around that 88 is loud. IGN, Push Square and GamesRadar+ all landed on 9/10. Push Square called it “one of the PS5’s very best action games,” its “intense and fast-paced combat system” the star. GamesRadar+ praised a world hiding “plenty of secret bosses and powerful weapons,” with combat that “effortlessly strikes down most of its peers.” Perfect 10s sit on the board too, including from TheGamer and Wccftech. For context, the 88 puts Phantom Blade Zero ahead of this year’s other headline blade games — Nioh 3 at 86 and Onimusha: Way of the Sword at 85 — which is why the phrase following it around this week is “Game of the Year contender.”

Then there is the dissent, and it is a real one. Eurogamer scored the game 6/10 — the lone low mark on the board. Its reviewer, Emma Kent, praised the animations, the environments and a combat flow she called “incredible” when it works, and still concluded that “balance and quality issues ultimately dim its shine,” faulting boss fights that slow the early pace and a “pretty unremarkable narrative.” That split — a game this fluid, scored this far apart — is the argument worth having tonight, and it is a more useful one than the average alone.

What you’re buying is a wuxia action RPG built in Unreal Engine 5 — S-GAME calls the style “kungfupunk,” classic Hong Kong action cinema wired into machinery and smoke. You play as Soul, an assassin framed for his master’s murder, revived with a ruined heart and exactly 66 days to live, hunting the conspiracy that condemned him across the martial world of the Wulin. The arsenal runs deep: over 30 primary weapons, plus more than 20 “Phantom Edges” taken from defeated foes. Reviewers put the main story around 20 to 30 hours.

The honest caveats travel with the praise. The recurring complaints across reviews are frame-rate dips and stuttering, a wayward camera, and story pacing that takes its time. Digital Foundry’s technical breakdown lays out the PS5 picture plainly: Performance mode targets 60fps at a dynamic 900p–1080p, Balanced mode runs 40fps, and Graphics mode runs 30fps at 1440p — so on PS5, Performance is the mode the game was clearly tuned around. On Steam Deck, early testing found it struggling to hold 30fps even at the lowest settings; Deck players should wait. There is no Xbox version at launch and no day-one Game Pass — among consoles, this is a PlayStation launch, and the physical PS5 editions don’t arrive until 2027.

Previously’s Take: An 88 with a 6/10 pinned to it is the healthiest launch profile a new studio can ask for — near-unanimous on the combat, honestly split on everything around it. If the parry-and-boss-fight loop is your genre, tonight at 7 PM PT is your night. If you play for the story, Eurogamer just told you to wait for a patch and a sale — and both camps are reading the same reviews.