Are you a potential buyer of Black Myth Wukong and want to see if your PC is up to the task of monkeying around non-stop? Wow, check this out! There’s a benchmarking tool out there right now from BMW (no, not the German multinational carmaker) that lets you preview how the game will run on your hardware.
The benchmarking tool is free, available only on Steam, and is separate from the game itself, coming in at just under 8GB. Like most other benchmarking tools, it plays a series of in-game sequences and assesses how your PC handles them in real time. You can also play around with the graphics options so you can see if you can run the game on minimum or recommended specs ahead of its August 20 launch.
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It's worth noting that “the test results may not fully reflect the actual gameplay experience and final performance at the time the game is released,” according to the developers. They also say that the tool tracks benchmark results, meaning it will be used to better identify “potential compatibility issues” before the game's release.
You can find the game's minimum and recommended specs at the bottom of its Steam page, and to be honest, they are more bad. Of course, I'm not Mr. Hardware, our lovely James.
I actually spent some time with the game a while back, and I thought it was a pleasantly surprising Soulslike, with genuine cinematic flourishes. While I questioned how it would develop over time, I really appreciated the more linear exploration. “Wukong's jungles, with their bamboo groves and undulating paths, felt laid out in the way you'd expect from a real-life walk, lending a strange kind of authenticity to its relative linearity,” I said. “The feeling that you were exploring carefully selected sections of a space, the wider world simultaneously being there and inaccessible — again, I think some of the best video game worlds are the ones you can't explore.”
If Wukong himself is appealing, many of his creators are known for making sexist comments and behaviors both on social media and within the studio, IGN reported last November. Game Science has yet to acknowledge IGN's reporting and declined to speak to me about it at the preview event above.