Phantom Blade Zero Explodes on Launch: 88 on Metacritic and 700,000 Steam Players in a Day

China may have its next global gaming hit. Phantom Blade Zero, the wuxia action RPG from Beijing studio S-Game, launched on October 29 for PlayStation 5 and PC — and within hours it was topping Steam's charts, drawing hundreds of thousands of players and earning some of the year's strongest review scores.

According to Polygon, the game reached 680,000 concurrent players on Steam within hours of release, sitting behind only Counter-Strike 2 among all Steam games, and became the second most-played single-player game of the year on the platform within hours. SteamDB data cited in later reports put the launch-day peak above 723,000. On the review side, the PC version holds an 88 average on Metacritic from 46 critic reviews, with a 91 average on OpenCritic, while the PS5 version sits at 87 — making it, by Metacritic's count, the highest-rated action game of the year.

What the game actually is

Phantom Blade Zero casts players as Soul, a warrior impaled through the chest who accepts an artificial heart that preserves his emotions but leaves him only 66 days to live. That countdown drives the story: a conspiracy, a framing, and a race through a world S-Game calls "kungfupunk" — wuxia martial arts fused with mechanical prosthetics, industrial ruins and modern rock, built on Unreal Engine 5.

As TechNode noted, the game invites Soulslike comparisons with its bosses and checkpoints, but reviewers describe something more direct: a combo-driven, parry-timing combat system with no stamina bar limiting normal moves, more than thirty weapons with customisable techniques, and multi-phase boss fights where cleared phases need not be replayed after dying. Bosses are the most consistently praised element across reviews, and the fight choreography draws on Hong Kong's golden age of action cinema.

The praise — and the caveats

The highs are very high: Game Informer awarded 9.5/10, IGN scored 9/10 and GamesRadar+ gave 4.5/5, all praising the combat, weapon design and atmosphere. The complaints cluster in the same three places: the story is uneven and terminology-heavy, difficulty balance is inconsistent, and PC technical polish is patchy, with some players reporting performance concerns and frame drops on PS5 Pro. Eurogamer's 60 stands out as the low mark among otherwise warm reviews. On the PlayStation Store, players have rated it 4.74 out of 5 from more than 9,600 reviews.

That combination — spectacular combat, shaky story — is why the launch matters beyond one game. After Black Myth: Wukong, Phantom Blade Zero is the latest test of whether Chinese studios can turn domestic craft into global blockbusters without sanding off what makes them distinctive. Its opening numbers say the audience is there: a wuxia game with a 66-day death sentence, released days before GTA 6 and a Zelda remake threaten to swallow every gaming budget, still found 700,000 people on day one. If S-Game can patch the rough edges, the conversation will shift from "surprise hit" to "how big can this get" — and the answer may arrive faster than anyone expected.

For another tech story where hardware met an awkward launch week, see our report on Apple's store memo on iPhone Duo display cracking.