Nioh 3’s hectic style switching combat and rewarding exploration have made it my most anticipated game of early 2026

We’re inching ever closer to the release of Nioh 3 on February 6, 2026, and last week, I was able to sample four hours of the upcoming Team Ninja-developed soulslike at an event in Paris. I consider its predecessor, Nioh 2, to be one of the best soulslike games ever, so I was very excited to discover all the ways the third game is changing and freshening up the formula. I did not leave disappointed.

At a base level, Nioh 3 delivers the slick, fast-paced combat you might expect if you’re familiar with Team Ninja’s back catalog. You can also still expect enemies to drop boatloads of loot, to keep your stamina pool ticking with well-timed Ki Pulse uses, and of course, to have your back doors blown out by some aggravatingly hard boss encounters. If you’re looking forward to more bread-and-butter Nioh gameplay, it’s all still here, and refined.

What has impressed me the most with Nioh 3 so far is the additions and changes to its gameplay. You have a lot more options here in terms of combat and exploration, but it’s all elegantly woven into familiar combat to make for an entirely fresh-feeling experience. I’m in love with the new Ninja play style, and being able to switch between it and the more traditional Samurai style is seamless and opens up so much creativity in combat.

I think the keyword to describe what Nioh 3 is going for is ‘choice.’ There is so much choice afforded here in terms of what kind of character you want to make (Nioh 2’s excellent character creator makes a return, for example), which weapons to want your build to focus on (Samurai and Ninja styles have completely unique weapons and armor available to them), and how you want to go about exploring the world with this new ‘open field’ approach to level design.

After four or so hours, the game feels like a grand and ambitious soulslike toybox. You simply have so many options and abilities to make a build feel truly like your own. I couldn’t quite gauge the overall feel of the difficulty as we went into the preview with overgeared characters for the sake of progression ease, but so far, I’m really liking this new and evolved direction for the Nioh series.

Pure style

My Nioh 3 preview began in an area entirely separate from what you may have played in the Alpha Demo earlier this year. Set in a pleasure district overrun by yokai, opportunistic bandits, and Shinsengumi officers, the first hour or so of this play session felt like something right out of either of the first two Nioh games.

It was the usual semi-linear level structure, with a few opportunities for exploration off the beaten path, that wound in and out of various buildings and through dark alleys. So rest assured, it seems like more traditional-style levels like this will still feature in Nioh 3.

One of the marquee gameplay features of Nioh 3 is the style switching mechanic. Between Samurai and Ninja, you effectively have control of two characters in one, both with completely unique weapons, armor, and abilities.

Samurai style is Nioh as you know it. You can adopt three weapon stances (high, medium, and low), all of which offer their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as different moves. The style also allows you to recover Ki (read: stamina) by tapping R1/RB to perform a Ki Charge shortly after attacking. It’s a solid starting point if you’re familiar with Nioh’s fundamentals.

One new addition for the Samurai style is a deflect action, which lets you nullify an enemy’s attack with a carefully-timed tap of the block button. It’s not quite a parry, as it doesn’t fully throw an enemy off guard, but it does grant you some time to interrupt their actions with attacks of your own. It’s a risk-reward feature that I welcome greatly, especially when guarding attacks felt fairly passive in Nioh 2.

Ninja style is the one I found to be much more interesting. Ninja abilities were in the previous games, but the whole system has been expanded. Ninja style doesn’t use weapon stances, instead offering you various ninpo (like a decoy ability to distract foes) and tools for combat like shuriken and bombs. Ninja is an extremely fast and aggressive play style. It’s balanced out here by lacking the ability to Ki Charge, so you really have to be mindful of your stamina usage.

When you’re in either the Samurai or Ninja styles, you also benefit from some improvements to overall movement. You can now jump and crouch, which are both used for exploration opportunities. But they also let you approach encounters in more creative ways. Jumping attacks are a thing now, for one, but crouching also lets you sneak up on enemies for powerful sneak attacks, making stealth an occasionally viable option. There was even one section where I was able to make use of tall grass to sneak around in.

One fantastic chance in Nioh 3 is how it handles parrying powerful red aura attacks. Instead of using a Burst Counter with R2 + Circle / RB + B like in Nioh 2, you instead perform a Burst Break here by tapping the style switch button (R2 / RB). This is a more instantaneous alternative, allowing you to counter these attacks more reliably. Plus, it incentivizes you to use and build both your Samurai and Ninja styles.

Open up

After clearing the pleasure district, which culminates in a fight with a fairly easy human boss, Nioh 3’s world begins to open up. The district was just one part of the larger map. And yes, for the first time, Nioh 3 has a map screen you can access at any time during play. The map shows you where to find primary and secondary objectives, treasures, powerful demon enemies, and more.

You can uncover more map elements by increasing your exploration level. You’ll naturally accrue experience here by finding chests, hidden friendly kodama yokai, and achieving smaller objectives like clearing an area of enemies, or otherwise. The map is divided into sections, each with its own maximum exploration level. So if you’re truly going for 100%, you’ll have to put the work in by doing the legwork yourself; not everything will be revealed right off the bat.

I do have a few concerns with this shift to an ‘open field’ format, as the developer calls it, though. For one, it was hard to gauge the general difficulty of Nioh 3 during this preview, as we were given very overpowered characters for what is presumably an early game section. As such, it was relatively easy to breeze through the content in the time we had. I imagine an appropriately leveled and geared character will have a much harder time, but as mine was around Level 100 with excellent gear, even boss encounters felt trivial.

Enemy AI could also do with some tuning. There were several instances where, on particularly narrow or treacherous terrain, enemies - including elites and mini bosses - would just leap backwards off a cliff to their deaths. I’m sure this isn’t intentional behavior, but it’s definitely comically anticlimactic and robbed me of an engaging fight every time it happened. And it happened worryingly frequently.

Pro woes?

Another concern I have is with Nioh 3’s visuals. The build I played was running on a PS5 Pro, but going back to Nioh 2 while I wait for the full release now, the third entry isn’t a particularly dramatic upgrade in the looks department. It’s still very pretty, and enemies are animated wonderfully, but there’s clearly still much reuse of Nioh 2 assets right down to identical enemy models and animations.

There also appears to be issues with textures awkwardly loading in. I frequently spotted bits of rubble, walls, and other generic objects struggling to render as I swung the camera around. Some would also briefly flash an unnatural bright white before loading in fully, which definitely hurt the immersion of the otherwise brilliantly macabre atmosphere. I’m not sure if this is a PS5 Pro-specific issue (the game does make use of PSSR on the premium console, too, which other games have had issues with), but it’s something I hope can be cleaned up before launch.

In spite of these issues, I’m still very excited for the full release of Nioh 3 next year. It builds upon the excellent yokai shifting combat of Nioh 2, refines its weaker elements, and gives you even more to play with besides. I adore the Ninja style and feel like it’s an exceptionally fun way to play a soulslike game in a more fast-paced, riskier manner. The open field concept has potential, too, even if some aspects of its design require further tuning and polishing before launch.

Nioh 3 launches on February 6, 2026, for PlayStation 5 and PC. Oh, and for all you Ninja Gaiden fans, the Izuna Drop does appear to be in the base game, and can be used freely with the Ninja style - no DLC required!

The best gaming consoles

➡️ Read our full guide to the best gaming consoles
1. Best overall:
PlayStation 5 Slim
2. Best budget:
Xbox Series S
3. Best handheld:
Nintendo Switch 2
4. Most powerful:
PlayStation 5 Pro

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