NARAKA: BLADEPOINT

Combat works like rock, paper, scissors. An attack can be charged and cancelled to throw off your opponent's timing, and a good parry knocks their weapon away and leaves them open. Devil May Cry and Sekiro were partly an influence.

There are more than two dozen heroes, and some come from popular Chinese novels.

The game launched as a paid title in August 2021, had sold more than six million copies by November, and went free to play in July 2023.

One reviewer at launch liked the movement and the fairly deep melee but was bothered by stutter and janky hitboxes. He also noticed that after the tutorial the game drops you into bot matches without clearly saying so. On Steam it has 73% positive out of 303,442 reviews, and 71 on Metacritic. By our Recommended Score it is #3,307 of 4,736.

Liked it? Try Apex Legends, where squads of three heroes talk through pings on the map, and Darwin Project, where ten prisoners with axes and bows fight in a snowy arena while an eleventh player runs the show.