Nioh 3

Team Ninja's Nioh series has built its reputation on unusually demanding, precise souls-like combat, and Nioh 3, released 5 February 2026, mostly lives up to that reputation on its own mechanical terms. "The legendary combat system has been honed," reads one representative review title, and that sentiment — genuine, specific praise for the swordplay itself — recurs across nearly the entire review sample, Mostly Positive at 79.2% across more than 11,000 reviews. What makes this review necessary to write in full rather than simply celebrating that combat is a severe, specific, and — checking review timestamps directly against the developer's own extensive patch history — still-unresolved PC performance problem that a substantial share of the negative sample cites as the single, sole reason an otherwise-loved game earns a thumbs down.

Combat that earns the series' reputation

Reviewers across the sample, including many who ultimately can't recommend the game overall, consistently praise the moment-to-moment swordplay as a genuine high point for the series. "Combat is just as fluid, great implementation of the new dual class system, open world feels very nice," one review states, describing a system that adds real build flexibility without diluting the demanding precision the series is known for. Another, a veteran with a thousand hours across the prior two games, frames the achievement carefully: "Coming from Nioh 2, Nioh 3 has REALLY good gameplay. Nioh 2 will always be in a class of its own, but 3 introduces new systems and changes the game enough to feel different from its predecessor." Co-op draws specific, consistent praise too — "just like we did with N2. Its a blast," one review notes, describing the demanding open world and boss encounters as genuinely more approachable, without feeling trivialised, when tackled with a partner.

The restructured open-world format itself — replacing the earlier games' mission-based level structure — draws real, specific credit from multiple reviewers. "Hey so you can actually make an open world style game where the exploration is rewarding and the collectibles actually do meaningful stuff," one enthusiastic review states, praising a build-crafting system built around collectible passives that reward genuine exploration rather than padding playtime.

A severe, specific, and still-current performance crisis

What keeps this review from simply endorsing that praise is how consistently, specifically, and recently the review sample documents a genuine PC performance failure. "Perhaps one of the worst optimized games I've ever had the displeasure of playing," one detailed review states. Another, running genuinely elite hardware, makes the scale of the problem concrete: "look at my rig: you literally cannot buy a better graphics card without dropping stupid money. 7900XTX and 9800X3D is the BEST case scenario for this game... But it still runs like crap!!" A specific, alarming claim appears in one review worth flagging directly given how consistently the underlying leak itself is independently corroborated elsewhere in the sample: "Why is there still a VRAM leak 3 months after launch? What are the devs even doing? I literally had a 3080 Ti burn up on me playing this game on launch." This review cannot independently verify that specific hardware failure was caused by the game rather than a coincidental separate issue, but the underlying VRAM leak it describes is reported consistently and independently by multiple other reviewers across the sample, making it a credible, corroborated technical complaint regardless of that one specific damage claim.

Crucially, this isn't a launch-week problem that's since faded. Checking the developer's own patch history directly shows genuine, sustained effort: numbered updates 1.04 through 1.07 shipped across roughly five months following launch, each with detailed patch notes. And yet reviews written as recently as late July 2026 — after all seven of those patches — continue reporting the identical core issues. "They need to release an update to help with the FPS. I have a decent rig and 6 months after release its still really bad," one review states, dated 4 July 2026. Another, dated 7 July: "Perhaps one of the worst optimized games I've ever had the displeasure of playing." A third, from 27 July, describes the game becoming "unplayable" with severe lag just past the two- hour mark. That consistency, spanning months and multiple patch cycles, is a stronger signal than any single complaint could be — this is a real, structural PC port problem that ongoing patching has meaningfully improved for some players without resolving for a substantial number of others.

A quieter complaint about content reuse

Separate from performance, a smaller but genuine thread of veteran-fan criticism concerns content originality. "80 EUR for 90% reused content from other Nioh's without a single new weapon class," one detailed review argues, a specific and checkable claim about the game's new-content ratio relative to its price. Several long-time fans of Nioh 2 specifically — the series' most beloved entry by wide consensus — describe the overall experience in more emotional terms as a result: "Maybe I'm just getting old but this game felt soulless," one review states, while another, more starkly: "Best way I can describe it is 'dry'... Nioh 2 was a direct upgrade over Nioh 1, but 3 just feels more or less parallel to" its predecessor rather than a clear step forward. That's a different, more subjective complaint than the performance crisis, but worth noting as a real, independently recurring sentiment among the series' most invested fans.

Where this leaves a buyer

At NZ$100.99, discounted to roughly $65 at the time of writing, Nioh 3 delivers genuinely excellent, series-best combat and a well-received restructuring of the open world that a large majority of players clearly enjoy — the Mostly Positive rating and the specific, sustained praise for the swordplay itself are real and well-earned. The honest, necessary caveat concerns PC performance specifically: a severe, well-documented VRAM leak and poor frame rates even on genuinely high-end hardware that five months and seven patches have improved without fully resolving, as recently as reviews written weeks before this one. Players with the most capable, well-cooled hardware available, and genuine patience for continued post-launch optimisation work, are likely to find the combat worth the risk. Players without top-tier PC hardware, or who've been burned by similarly troubled ports before, should wait for further performance patches — or the game's genuinely frequent discount cycles — before committing.