Black Desert Mobile meets Chinese fantasy in a mobile MMO that has promise but is still messy
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SHOULD I PLAY SWORD OF MYSTIC SHU?
Skip this beta test and wait for the full release to see how it turns out. Sword of Mystic Shu offers incredible graphics and a beautiful Xianxia visual style, but it’s held back by a myriad of performance and technical issues. It shows a lot of promise and could easily become one of the biggest mobile MMOs out there, but it’ll need a ton of time in development to realize that potential. As for right now, it’s not worth jumping into the open beta, even if you love playing MMOs.
TIME PLAYED
I played Sword of Mystic Shu for three hours. I’ve completed nearly four dozen quests, and I’m currently at rank Phase 1 Immortal, which is comparable to level twenty breakthroughs or ascensions in most MMOs. In my playthrough, I’ve explored three major locations out of the twenty-some regions in the game, and I’ve leveled my Qi power to QiPrep level one.
WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT SWORD OF MYSTIC SHU?
• Visual quality and style. Sword of Mystic Shu’s Xianxia style and high-quality visuals are its best features. Developed on Unreal Engine 5, this game has some of the most beautiful visuals I’ve seen in any mobile MMO. From the NPCs wandering the streets, to the architecture of the city buildings, to the mystical forests that span across the world, everything in this game looks stunning. Even the game’s monsters are beautifully detailed.
• Combat is decent. Swinging a sword in the air with mystical powers and launching barrages of swords against multiple enemies felt pretty badass. While the game’s poor performance prevented me from getting too immersed, I still enjoyed slashing my way through demons and evil warriors. Despite technical issues, movement animations during combat always seemed smooth and dynamic. And with so many skills and play styles I haven’t tried yet, this first taste of Sword of Mystic Shu leaves me optimistic about the potential for the combat system in particular to keep impressing in the future.
WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN SWORD OF MYSTIC SHU?
• The performance sucks. A huge misconception with mobile games is that better graphics and bigger games means better quality and that just isn’t true. Just because it’s built on Unreal Engine 5 and has amazing graphics doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Sword of Mystic Shu has fallen into this trap and in its current form, at least, is not optimized for mobile gaming. I tested the game on normal settings on a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S22 5G phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor—not the absolute top-of-the-line Android phone, but far from a slouch. Even with that power, though, the game still struggled to keep up; my frame rate fluctuated between twenty and forty FPS. The performance got so bad that I would’ve preferred playing Sword of Mystic Shu on PC to see how it would affect the overall experience.
• Changing languages. When I first opened Sword of Mystic Shu, the entire game was in Chinese and I couldn’t figure out how to change languages. There was no option or guide in the login or character selection menu to change the language settings. I had to do some research and read comments in the game’s official Discord server to see how I could switch languages and it was an intricate process. I had to create a character, jump into the actual gameplay, tap on the settings, and navigate through them to change the language, and then reset the game to apply those changes. Talk about a headache! It’s fine that this game is targeting a Chinese audience first and foremost, but since the beta is being offered globally, I’d expect a less frustrating experience for English-language players.
• Poor localization. Unfortunately, the localization issues didn’t stop with the language setting problem. A lot of the English dialogue and text in Sword of Mystic Shu simply doesn’t make sense, which made it hard to piece together information. I never really understood anything the game was trying to tell me, whether it was about the ongoing storyline or the actual game mechanics. Figuring out how to do everything on my own overwhelmed me and made for a bad experience.
• Technical issues. There’s only one available server for Sword of Mystic Shu’s beta test, and that means some players around the world—myself among them—have experienced a ton of lag, crashes, and rubber banding. The game wasn’t unplayable, but regularly getting kicked from the servers or hitting brutal lag spikes certainly pulled me out of the excitement of exploring a big new MMO. I’m cautiously optimistic that more servers will fix this issue, so hopefully those are on the way.
• A terrible user interface. The buttons and panels that make up Sword of Mystic Shu’s interface are placed around the screen seemingly at random, in awkward places and at inconsistent sizes. This isn’t as pressing as the other problems I experienced with the game, but it did make things uncomfortable from time to time.
PLATFORM TESTED
Android via Samsung Galaxy Ultra S22 5G phone.
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