Honkai: Star Rail Reviews
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 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.
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.
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 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.