![]() Gacha games by nature are usually predatory, and developer Hoyoverse is certainly no stranger to this. From Himeko’s tea-sipping and destructive ‘Heavenly Flare’ Ultimate, to Natasha’s healing skill that playfully launches a teddy bear piñata in the air, it’s clear that a lot of care has been taken to fill these dynamic scenes with character. You get an even stronger sense of their personalities in battle as every character’s Ultimate comes with some incredibly detailed animations. There’s Dan Heng, cool and composed with a bit of snark March 7th, the bubbly Zillennial equipped with a camera for taking selfies along the way and Himeko and Welt Yang, the wise but sarcastic ‘parents’ of the Astral Express. The characters themselves are interesting, flaunting flashy designs that wouldn’t look out of place on a techwear runway. Whether upcoming characters or items render this current roster obsolete remains to be seen. However, as is the nature of the genre, there is always a risk of ‘power creeping’ in future. Unlike many other gacha games, these free characters are surprisingly great and worth building up. This can largely be attributed to the eight free characters you obtain simply from playing the main quest. But for more difficult modes, such as the Forgotten Hall (a stage-clearing battle format similar to Genshin’s Spiral Abyss), building specific teams that cater to the enemy’s weak points is a key consideration.Īt the time of writing, during the game’s launch window, everything in Honkai: Star Rail feels well balanced. Having a team that covers a variety of elements and Paths is usually enough to get one through the mainline content. Once you factor in each character’s unique play styles and skills, the sheer variety of ways you can build a team for battle is what keeps Star Rail so varied and exciting. ‘The Preservation’ and ‘The Abundance’ are shield and healing-based characters while ‘The Harmony’ and ‘The Nihility’ buff the party and debuff enemies. Adding another interesting layer of complexity are the ‘Paths’ of each character – similar to classes – which determine their role on the field.įor example, ‘The Destruction’, ‘The Hunt’ and ‘The Erudition’ are a team’s main DPS dealers, playing the role of tank, single-target offense and area-of-effect damage respectively. There’s an engaging element of strategy when it comes to pairing the right characters and their elements, to fight the right opponent. Enemies have both a health bar and a shield bar, and the latter must be broken through by exploiting elemental weaknesses, which allows characters to deal significantly more damage overall. ![]() The turn-based combat system of Honkai: Star Rail is reminiscent of classic Japanese RPGs, with its own twist. In one entertaining example, ‘talking’ to enough trash cans in the Administrative District zone of Jarilo-VI earns you a trash can icon that you can use as your player avatar, an entertaining acknowledgement that most players will have a tendency to try to interact with everything.įrameborder="0" allow="accelerometer autoplay clipboard-write encrypted-media gyroscope picture-in-picture web-share" allowfullscreen> Each story arc seems set on taking you to a new planet or colony, and they’re dense enough to satisfy any itch for exploration – sometimes surprisingly so. It isn’t a true open world, but still feels richly detailed. The world of Honkai: Star Rail is made up of self-contained maps that require you to navigate through a series of zones, with plenty of ways to interact with the environment whether that’s breaking objects to obtain items, looting chests or battling monsters. But Star Rail sees Hoyoverse greatly improve on its storytelling, what is being said, and the way it’s delivered, to great benefit. Even a jab at the buzzwordiness of ‘metaverse’ has a clever double entendre.Ĭutscenes remain unskippable – which has been a large pain point for Genshin players. The writing of Star Rail is lighthearted, peppered with jokes and pop culture references to things like Bloodborne, Final Fantasy, Fight Club. While much of the story unfolds dramatic space opera themes, what’s endearing about Honkai: Star Rail is that the game clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously, at least in its English translation. Read: Meta and mathematicians: The world of Genshin Impact theorycrafting
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