Honkai: Star Rail Reviews
With stellar storytelling and satisfying progression that offer dozens of hours of content that newcomers and hardcore players can enjoy, Honkai: Star Rail is a free-to-play RPG that might hook you for months – without making you feel like you have to pay.
Some subtle improvements to the grind and flexible turn-based tactics mean Honkai: Star Rail's off to a fine start.
Despite its gacha systems, Honkai: Star Rail is an impeccable turn-based RPG with a killer visual style
Not just great for a free-to-play game, Honkai: Star Rail is a genuinely fantastic RPG with slick combat and an engaging story loaded with content. The biggest caveat is, while generous, its gacha system may tempt some players into unwise purchases.
In many ways, Honkai: Star Rail shows a refinement of Hoyoverse’s work up to this point. The game eschews the excesses of an ever-expanding world from Genshin, instead creating tightly designed, linear worlds and dense systems from start to finish. You’ll fight to save the world with dazzling snow bunnies and text your new friends in the meantime. Rather than restricting the developers and their vision, Star Rail’s design leaves ample room for them to build out other aspects of the game. By pairing a refined, turn-based system with a comedic, lighthearted writing style, Star Rail’s future route looks like it’ll be a smooth ride.
Honkai: Star Rail is still in its early stages, but this free-to-play turn-based gacha game is incredibly good fun. With a strong opening, heavy focus on story, and simple but deep turn-based battles, this RPG is bursting with potential.
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.
Honkai: Star Rail isn't a groundbreaking experience or a massive new open-world action game, but it's still full of promise and potential as a polished, pretty, and easy-to-master RPG experience.
Overall, Version 2.2 is a fairly standard update with its pros and cons and is much below the quality delivered with the previous patch, Version 2.1. Even with its flaws, mostly in its flagship event, the new patch delivered unforgettable moments and strong characters, even if they did not prove themselves as indispensable as the reruns. The best accomplishment of the patch lies in the narrative, as the main campaign quests in Version 2.2 establish Penacony as the best story arc in Honkai: Star Rail so far.
Honkai: Star Rail is also constantly giving players free pulls through simple login events, so while the magnitude of the rewards in the anniversary event should not come as a surprise, they are still remarkable. Overall, combining the anniversary event’s fun and generosity, alongside the involving depth of the narrative and the superb quality of the new 5-star characters, Honkai: Star Rail 2.1 is possibly the best patch yet. Hopefully, that can be surpassed.
Characters operating as power creeps in the majority of Penacony’s fights are not a good indicator, as HoYoverse needs to develop a way of continuing to challenge parties without simply boosting enemies’ Max HP. Overall, Version 2.0 is a fairly positive release for the game. While it does have some issues in combat and is occasionally lackluster in some aspects, it does offer a wide range of content and hits the nail on the head with its campaign, which sets the groundwork for another impressive year of stories told in Honkai: Star Rail.
Honkai Star Rail offers a palpable universe full of possibilities on top of an accessible turn-based combat system that you can dig as deeply into as you want. There's a grind involved with any gacha game, and Honkai Star Rail is no exception. Strong writing, intriguing characters, and engrossing combat make Honkai Star Rail a must-play game that's also relatively friendly to free-to-play players.
Honkai: Star Rail, already a tremendous success, transfers to PS5 flawlessly – and is almost guaranteed to become one of the most-played games on the platform. In some ways its bite-sized nature means it's more at home on mobile, but its beautiful anime art style and stunning animations deserve to be experienced on a big screen. While its narrative is occasionally overwritten, and it demands players invest a lot to experience it to its fullest, this is a live service executed impeccable. And the truly exciting thing is that the best is yet to come.
Honkai Star Rail highlights the issues that Genshin Impact had despite how many issues have been addressed. The game's barebones RPG mechanics will definitely improve over time, but it still will take a lot to convince any enthusiast to pick this game over other turn-based RPG gacha games.
Those issues aren't directly related to the core of Star Rail, however, which shines as brightly as any of the celestial bodies it tasks players with visiting. The quality of content at launch is, quite simply, incredible - it really looks, feels, and plays like a live service game that has already been out for years. Its turn-based combat might, tragically, not be for everyone, even in spite of its depth of tactics and highly customizable loadouts. That should be something everyone decides for themselves, however. Honkai: Star Rail is a must-play 2023 release that could very well become the next big thing in live service games, and will, if nothing else, become one of the better RPG releases in recent memory.
Honkai Star Rail is already one of the most exciting RPGs in years even before its first major content update. While the grind may eventually chase you away, its excellent writing and original combat system make Honkai Star Rail well worth diving into, especially with no upfront cost.
With Honkai Star Rail, Hoyoverse has shown that his is not simple luck and that the success of his productions is due to the ability of the teams to create experiences open to all, able to engage thanks to well-characterized characters and a gameplay that keeps glued to the screen.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Honkai Star Rail is a highly polished turn-based RPG that builds off the Hoyoverse gacha machine, and while it certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel, its colourful cast of characters and mercurial tone sets it on the right track.
Honkai: Star Rail upholds miHoYo's strong reputation for compelling RPGs. Even with the gacha systems, it offers a fun free-to-play experience with fun story-telling, interesting companions and sleek gameplay.
Honkai Star Rail is yet another surprising small jewel, proving itself to be so much more than just a "Genshin Impact in space".
Review in Italian | Read full review