We live in the age of the Soulslike, and Black Myth: Wukong is living proof. Gone are the days of mediocre action RPGs that barely even came close to FromSoftware’s greats; developers are spitting out exceptional Soulslikes left and right, and now it’s Wukong’s turn to take center stage.

Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA-standard release from Chinese developer Game Science. It’s loud and dramatic from the start, with top-notch combat and more top-quality boss fights than I’ve ever seen in a Soulslike. But while it gets a lot of things right, it misses a few key elements of the formula, holding it back from achieving true greatness.

Let me get straight to the point: Black Myth: Wukong’s combat and boss fights are excellent. Shortly after you complete the opening section, you wake up in a patch of dirt with nothing but a staff and a health bar, and a few moments later it’s time to start crushing skulls. While Wukong lacks the build diversity of Souls games and most Souls-like games, the combat is refined, tightly designed, and—best of all—fun. There’s no parry, but there’s a flawless dodge system that feels satisfying and responsive, though the slow-mo effect when you dodge perfectly occasionally threw me off by causing me to mistime my next dodge roll.

Hitboxes feel pixel-perfect for the most part, and attacks are telegraphed well, so when you die, it’s usually because you need gud. Importantly, there’s a huge variety of enemy types (with a ton of new enemies each chapter), so fights always feel fresh, and my god, the boss fights. They’re relentlessly challenging, especially from chapter two onwards, and there are so many—from field minibosses to large-scale battles with Yaoguai—gigantic Chinese mythological monsters ranging from beautiful to grotesque. You could copy these boss fights into a FromSoftware game and you probably wouldn’t know the difference, which is a glowing compliment to the boss designers at Game Science.