Honkai: Star Rail is amongst the most anticipated games of the year, thanks in part to it being the next title from Genshin Impact developer HoYoverse. It’s set to release this Wednesday the 26th of April, and for those who absolutely need to login as early as possible you can now begin to pre-install and download it from the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Honkai: Star Rail is also due to release the same day on PC via the Epic Game Store while the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 release is going to come at a later date.
Honkai Star Rail is set after Honkai Impact 3rd in a parallel universe. That’s somewhat irrelevant if you’re new to Hoyoverse games, but basically, you play as an amnesiac with a mysterious device implanted in your body, and you get to ride around space in a train visiting other planets and trying to help them. It feels a lot like a Star Ocean game in that respect.
Combat has you balancing skill points gained from normal attacks with using those points for your special attacks, and also trying not to die. You also generate energy for your ultimate attack as you battle, with each character having their own selection for each of those things. Some characters can create shields for others or heal, while others might buff you and debuff the enemies, while others are standard DPS characters. The fun comes in trying to balance different elemental characters and find synergies between different team setups.
You can then further customize your characters with different Light Cones, which are a bit like weapons that all have varying passive effects, and Relics, which give different stats and more passive effects. Much like Genshin Impact, the aim here is for you to find your own strategy and min-max the hell out of it, but it feels a bit more impactful as you can’t just skillfully dodge through attacks, because you literally have to let enemies hit you.
If you want to learn more about the anime-flavoured turn-based title, check out our full preview here.
