It only took one match of Wildgate to see the potential in its spacefaring PvPvE mayhem. The intensely cooperative chaos of managing a spacecraft, delving into PvE dungeons for loot, and fending off rival crews makes for complex and exciting contests of teamwork and communication. After dozens of matches and more than 20 hours of playtime, though, it’s also become clear that there’s plenty of room left to build on that compelling concept. There are only a small number of characters, ships, and weapons to bring into battle, and once you’ve trekked across a few matches worth of dungeons, you’ll likely have seen all the different enemies to fight and areas to explore, which limits the longevity of these cosmic bouts. But when a good crew comes together, Wildgate’s simple but solid gunplay and multifaceted ship-to-ship combat gives Sea of Thieves a run for its money.

Wildgate is a unique multiplayer shooter that sends five teams of four players out into the most dangerous section of the galaxy, called the Reach, to battle it out for loot and glory. Their ultimate goal is to find the all-important Artifact hidden somewhere in space and escape with it out of the Wildgate, but since there’s the little issue of only being one to go around, a clash of crews in tumultuous FPS combat is all but inevitable. To improve your chances of survival (and search for the Artifact along the way), you’ll want to hurriedly touch down on various asteroids and planetoids to enter as many of the small PvE dungeons as possible, killing enemies and solving simple puzzles to claim whatever loot they’re hiding.

Upgrading your spacecraft with better shields, weapons, defensive measures, and stat improvements (like improved turning speed) can make all the difference when an enemy vessel nears and all hell breaks loose, which make for Wildgate’s tensest moments. I especially enjoy picking my favorite cannons for my ship, as there are some really neat options, like the sniper cannon that can cause a whole lot of trouble for enemies even when they’re far away, or the bomb cannon that attaches bombs to whatever they hit and can be exploded when shot by another cannon. If you’re able to find and escape with the Artifact, or simply murder all the enemy crews before they’re able to extract it themselves, then victory is yours – and in matches that can run over 40 minutes each, the taste of triumph is one of the sweetest there is.

Unfortunately, the level of coordination required doesn’t always lead to great outcomes when matchmaking with random crewmates, where silent players or, worse yet, insanely toxic personalities can make for a bad time. I found the vast majority of my matchmade experiences resulted in catastrophically bad showcasings of Wildgate’s potential, as you really need a full team communicating and firing on all cylinders to have any hope of beating your opponents. But when I got lucky with matchmade teams or brought my own friends to the party, working together to take down dungeons and outplay rival squads made for some incredibly memorable matches.

There’s no story to be found in Wildgate, or at least not one outside of little snippets you can read from a menu between matches, but the world definitely has a distinct and endearing personality to it. That could be in the baddies like raiders and alien life forms who look like booger people, or the playable characters, called Prospectors, who span from a big dog-looking alien to an aquatic creature in a mecha fishbowl. Each Prospector has their own interesting set of traits and abilities they can use to contribute to the team’s success (or demise). A four-armed alien named Ion, for example, can use his brawn to damage the hulls of ships just by smacking them with his fists, while Venture the robot serves as a great starter character since they don’t require oxygen to survive, regenerate health faster, and get warned when enemies are behind them.

I had a lot of fun trying each one out to see which suits my playstyle, with my favorite being Sal, an aquatic engineer who is an expert at healing the ship and can turn unwanted loot into useful items by rerolling it – a frankly overpowered ability in a game where your luck with loot drops is often the difference between life and death. There seems to be a little bit of imbalance with the characters in that regard, as Prospectors like Kae, whose teleport and telekinesis abilities makes her amazing at boarding ships without notice, even stealing items off their hull without ever entering the vessel, can seem quite busted at times. On the other hand, characters like Adrian, who can mostly just move through space extremely quickly, feel woefully underpowered by comparison. And, as is the case with lots of stuff in Wildgate, the biggest issue is simply a scarcity of options, because it doesn’t take long to unlock all seven Prospectors and decide on the winners. Seeing the same handful of familiar characters aboard each ship just feels a bit underwhelming in what’s supposed to be a galaxy of possibilities.

There are also several ships to unlock, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Your starter ship, the Hunter, is reliable all around, with three front-facing cannons and increased speed when you elect to drop your shields that make it well-suited for getting in and out of skirmishes quickly, but the other three are more interesting in their tradeoffs. My favorite, The Bastion, has a special feature that makes it much more difficult to board by rival players, with doors that lock down tight (if your knucklehead teammates remember to close them) and the ability to detect intruders by default – plus it has more health and defensive capabilities than other ships to offset its modest cannons and speed. This allowed me to play it slow in matches, building up defenses and resources while outlasting my opponents like a balled up hedgehog waiting to prick would-be predators.

There’s also the Privateer, a warship with eight cannon slots that fire faster and do more damage than other ships, which all but mandates an extremely aggressive playstyle that either proved immediately effective or resulted in the shortest matches imaginable. Finally, there’s the Scout: a tiny little ship with low health and offense that’s more than made whole by insane maneuverability and speed, and which I must admit that I won the most matches with just because being able to more easily find or steal the artifact, then outrun my opponents for a quick extraction, is pretty hard to beat. Unfortunately, these were also some of the less interesting games I played since ship-to-ship combat is so much fun and it’s tough to set that aside in the name of victory.

When fighting on foot, you’ll use a small handful of weapons and gadgets to ward off NPC monsters, and occasionally other players when boarding or being boarded by the enemy. With only nine weapons currently available, there’s not a lot of different playstyles to choose from. That’s especially true when some options like the Sidelong launcher, a weird, horizontally-firing blaster that pierces through the environment, didn’t really connect with me and gathered dust on the shelf, making my viable pool of options that much smaller. Still, there are a few that stole my heart, like the goo-firing gatling gun or the powerful anti-ship rocket launcher that lets you tear through enemy vessels without needing to be mounted on a turret. You’ll also pick two gadgets to keep in your toolbelt, which allow you to do things like toss a drill onto the side of a ship to damage it over time, or a tool that automatically reloads all your weapons whenever you teleport back to your ship. My personal favorite is the rock, which is, well, a rock. You throw it at people and it does enormous damage – I just really appreciate that they could have made it a throwing dagger, but they chose the funniest possible option instead. There are few better feelings than bringing down a rampaging enemy who is carrying a massive weapon with a regular ol’ rock.

Although matches can be a ton of fun and you can definitely develop a “just one more match” mindset early on, with only one game mode and such limited character and ship options, it all feels a tad thin at the moment. Wildgate could have some real legs with regular content updates, and it’s nice that developer Moonshot Games has already put out a roadmap that promises three new characters or ships per year, because what’s here at the moment feels like just a taste of what will hopefully be a game with a lot more variety down the road. I’m not quite sure that update cadence will be fast enough to sustain my short attention span, but it’s at least a good sign there’s a plan in place that has the potential to keep me coming back to this weird galaxy. There’s still a ton of fun to be found in getting better at winning, and knowing what I know now about the types of dungeons to be found and loot to be claimed has made me a lot more strategic with how I play, but I stopped being surprised by things I saw out in the Reach pretty quickly.

One thing that does help keep games fresh is the fact that there are randomly generated modifiers injected into each match that require you to adapt if you want a chance at winning. One game might feature energy-devouring leeches floating out in the void that attach to your ship as you go and need to be shot off, while another might be filled with an abundance of asteroids that make traveling especially dangerous, or a cosmic storm that sweeps through large swathes of the map and will destroy your ship unless you’re able to loot a special shield to defend against it. These are a really clever way to make every match not feel like a carbon copy of the last, but once again, there just aren’t that many of them yet, and I started seeing repeat modifiers in pretty short order – definitely one of the areas where a bit more variety would go quite a long way, especially if they have live events that impact the world in some way to shake things up.

Last weekend, a global beta test began for Where Winds Meet, the open-world game published by NetEase that is already available in China. This free-to-play game takes place around the year 1000 between the great Tang and Song dynasties during what’s known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. In it, players take the role of a lone wandering hero during this time of upheaval where one’s own strength matters more than the rules of society. IGN readers may not be too familiar with the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, but don’t worry – the same even seems to apply to players in China.

We know that the game takes some influence from Ghost of Tsushima and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild thanks to a past interview with lead designer Chris Lyu, but it can be difficult to imagine exactly what the gameplay will be like. According to Lyu, it is “the world’s first wuxia-themed open-world” game. Once I got my hands on the game, I found Where Winds Meet was indeed a wuxia game through-and-through, with the strength of the concept bringing together a variety of elements seen in games today.

Once you’re finished with character creation and begin playing the game, you’re first met with a graceful man with flowing hair resting in a bamboo grove while holding a baby to his chest, almost like Zhao Yun from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Then, another handsome and long-haired man comes to talk to him, and it seems that this man with a baby has betrayed his school. He hops on a white horse then gallops through the bamboo while avoiding his pursuer’s weapons, at times in slow motion. All of these shots are reminiscent of famous scenes from various Chinese movies of the past, making it clear from the start that this game is closely linked to the wuxia tradition.

A sense of “wuxia-ness” oozes out of this game at every turn even after this opening scene ends and you take control of the character you’ve created – whether that’s through its gameplay in general, its systems and graphics, or its dialogue. A few minutes after I started walking freely through its world, I spoke to an old man on the side of the road who asked me to repel a bear who’s been after honey. It seems that the protagonist is able to learn techniques from the movements of the bear, as pressing buttons at the right time according to icons that pop up caused him to learn tai chi from the beast, incredibly enough.

All of this serves as a tutorial for the Mystic Arts that make up part of your arsenal, but more importantly, this process of observing familiar objects and nature to learn abilities and grow stronger gives the player a strong sense of the game’s wuxia flavor. It seems there are other abilities that come from nature, like Lion’s Roar and the venomous Toad Style, so I’m sure there will be many other techniques the protagonist learns from all the creatures of the game’s world. Just as you might expect to be able to use magic to create fire in a game with a fantasy setting, the player in this game’s wuxia world is able to master strange powers of their own. It’s also interesting to note that these abilities can be used outside of combat as well. For example, nearby fish are caught up in tai chi when it’s used by the water’s surface, making for efficient fishing.

One of the most notable things about this thoroughly wuxia game is its inclusion of many elements we’ve come to expect from combat systems and exploration in action games today. For example, pressing the correct button just before an enemy’s attack lands will parry it, creating a back-and-forth tempo during action segments.

While equivalent to the kinds of parry systems that have become a staple in recent action games, this game goes into slow motion when it’s time to parry an enemy attack and displays an icon telling you what button to press (though it is possible to turn this icon off in the options). While similar to Final Fantasy XVI’s Story-Focused mode, these icons deplete an Insight Points meter when they’re displayed and won’t show up if you run out, so you can’t recklessly fend off every single enemy attack.

There are currently seven weapon types that a player can use (with plans to add more). In addition to standard swords and spears, there are also more unusual weapons like umbrellas and folding fans. Each weapon provides for its own unique gameplay, such as the umbrella’s skill that temporarily stuns an enemy, or the fan’s ability to create a zone that heals the player and their allies.

Players can equip both a main weapon and a sub-weapon, each enabling a variety of martial techniques. What techniques are available to you will also change based on the school you study under, with a total of eleven available schools. The game’s combat style changes quite a bit depending on the combination of mystic and martial skills you use, allowing for a wide degree of customization. Between all of the different attacks, the balance between offense and defense enabled by parries, and the overall voracious approach to combat elements, it felt like the game had taken a menu of popular modern features and ordered one of everything.

The bow and arrow is treated differently whether it’s being used as a main or a sub-weapon, capable of attacking enemies from afar while also solving puzzles by burning through vines to open up pathways. The way it’s positioned shows the influence of another game that was previously mentioned, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The game’s core of open world exploration and progression has also been extravagantly created. During the preview, I was able to visit Kaifeng, one of China’s eight ancient capitals located in Heinan province that flourished at the time as one of the world’s largest cities. Despite the war-ravaged world, the city in the game was open and lively, with its residents chatting away like it was Cyberpunk 2077 after just a short walk through its streets. It sounds like upwards of a thousand NPCs have reputation levels, allowing you to befriend them on an individual basis.

It’s not hard to imagine how people live in the game’s detailed streets of Kaifeng, apparently recreated by referring to historical remains that still exist today. Walk down the big street that cuts through it all and eventually you’ll find a large arching bridge. A beautiful palace with towering defenses awaits you on the other side, making it clear just how prosperous this Chinese capital was at the time. From there the player will be able to dig into the secrets around their own birth as a wandering hero.

After only about three hours of gameplay, I could tell that Where Winds Meet is packed full of elements that players have experienced before in open-world games. But what shocked me most of all is that while you could call this a mishmash of features, the key concept of wuxia along with the way those elements are presented worked to bring all of them together in a natural way. Perhaps you could say that what best defines Where Winds Meet is this coexistence of the past decade of what has made open-world and action games fun alongside its Chinese creators’ love for the genre of wuxia.