Honkai: Star Rail – it costs nothing to try it (pic: HoYoverse)

The GameCentral tries to make sense of the follow-up to Genshin Impact and what is another free-to-play game with sky high production values.

If you could travel back in time to the mid-80s, when the first generation of post-Atari games consoles were making their way into people’s houses, you’d find a trickle of game releases costing at least £45 each – twice that if you wanted an import from Japan or the US, where titles were generally released earlier. The games themselves were as variable as they are now, but by today’s standards all of them looked laughably primitive.

During your time travels, if you spoke to 80s gamers about what life is like in 2023, you’d be met with abject disbelief. That would only get worse if you showed them Honkai: Star Rail, a game with 4K graphics and hundreds of hours’ worth of high quality, fully voiced entertainment, and explain that not only can you play it at home on your PC, and continue on the bus using your UHD phone, but that the whole thing is completely free.

Yet this is the world we’re all now used to. Following the enduring success of 2020’s Genshin Impact, which had similarly sky high production values, and was also free to download, Chinese developer miHoYo’s follow up does come across very much like Genshin Impact in Space. It also sports a Final Fantasy 10 through 13 era aesthetic, its characters favouring spiky, gravity-ignoring haircuts and colourful clothes with numerous extraneous straps hanging off them.

That retro chic extends to the combat, which is turn-based and, like middle era Final Fantasies, involves your entire party and every single enemy, with everyone lined up neatly waiting for their go. Special abilities work on cooldowns, but can be used to interrupt turn order, giving a small extra layer to your tactical approach by letting you get in ahead of potentially lethal enemy attacks.

More significant is the weakness system, which makes each enemy more susceptible to certain types of magical attack. In fights that are evenly matched, making sure you select a party that exploits enemy weaknesses is essential to success in combat that’s generally lean and fast paced, with special moves looking appropriately cinematic.

It’s just as well fighting feels good, because random battles are as much Honkai’s stock-in-trade as they were in early Japanese role-players. Naturally, that grind helps levelling and stat growth, but it also supplies a steady flow of fights that can feel pretty same-y. Provided you’re not facing tough opposition, auto-battle makes light work of those moments, but against more powerful foes it’s almost always worth doing your own fighting.

Then there’s the dialogue, of which there is a near obscene amount. In common with Genhsin Impact there’s exposition all over the place, from odd little asides with non-player characters, to a plot that’s often utterly impenetrable for its weird complexity and references to names and organisations that you’ve either never heard before or are so dimply aware of that they’re effectively unknown to you.

It’s a strange choice, but the net effect is almost hypnotic. Listening to your party witter on about the hugely convoluted plot point almost evokes an ASMR sensation, with conversations about god knows what going on so long you can barely believe someone went to the trouble of writing all that nonsense. It’s not fine literature, but there’s something oddly comforting about the sheer volume and incomprehensibility of it all.

That sense of functional endlessness permeates everything about Honkai: Star Rail. Its story feels like an unstoppable juggernaut that you can live with as long as you want, provided you’re okay to level up your party enough to keep knocking your way through more content. Its systems, which initially feel so complex and arcane you can’t conceive of finding your own way through them without continual prompts, eventually start to make perfect sense.

Honkai: Star Rail – combat is traditional but fun (pic: HoYoverse)

Even the sales process has an elegance often lacking in free-to-play games. New heroes are lent to you so you can try them out before splashing cash, there are no ads, and its various bundle deals and offers are proffered without feeling like a hard sell.

Levels are full of loot and there’s an underlying need to feel as though you’ve ticked off every day’s login bonus and freebies, but it’s all done with an aplomb from which Western devs could learn a thing or two – the most recent catastrophic update of Supercell’s Clash Royale being a useful and ghastly case in point.

It’s practically impossible to review Honkai: Star Rail. It’s so huge you couldn’t hope to finish it and even if you could, as a live service game, it continues to change and evolve as it updates. The anime art style may or may not appeal, and the old school random monster encounters might irritate or feel like coming home, but at least it won’t cost you anything to find out.

Whatever your views, it’s a monumental piece of game development and well worth a look, even if just to marvel at the high budget window dressing and wallow in its manifold, blissful absurdities.

Formats: iOS (reviewed), PC, and Android
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Cognosphere
Developer: HoYoverse
Release Date: 26th April 2023
Age Rating: 12+

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GameCentral tries to make sense of the follow-up to Genshin Impact and what is another free-to-play game with sky high production values.