Mobile game developer miHoYo has been around for a long time, but it wasn’t until the launch of Genshin Impact that the team shattered expectations around the world of what a mobile game could really be. The open-world, Breath of the Wild-inspired, gacha action game took plenty of familiar elements and crammed them together in an impossibly beautiful mix that felt like a massive step up from what was expected from mobile gaming. Genshin Impact is growing larger every year, but so is miHoYo – while the golden Genshin goose continues to thrive, so too is the team. More talent and even more money has helped make it possible for the studio to launch multiple new projects, and one of those is Honkai: Star Rail – a free RPG adventure that, while nowhere near as revolutionary or inventive as Genshin Impact, has the promising beginnings of an addictive new gacha game adventure.
While Honkai: Star Rail shares a name with the often under-looked third currently-running miHoYo mobile game Honkai Impact 3rd, they’re not connected narratively – besides a supporting character with the familiar name Bronya. Honkai: Star Rail is an entirely standalone story and it kicks off with a bang – when your game’s opening cutscene shows a badass lady dressed in purple playing air-violin to Pachelbel’s Canon while her henchmen break into a space station to secure an ancient relic, you know you’re in for something good. The mysterious woman, Kafka, uncovers something called a Stellaron and decides to seal it inside the body of the Trailblazer – a white-haired amnesiac who serves as your protagonist for the rest of the story. You soon discover that the station you’re on is under attack by the Antimatter Legion, but a group of fighters from something called the Astral Express roll up to save you, defeat the Antimatter Invaders, and offer you a safe-haven on their intergalactic express train as they continue on to their next adventures.
Honkai: Star Rail is a brand new mobile game, and these kind of games tend to develop and expand upon their stories with new chapters and events across multiple years. Genshin Impact famously started with a small and simple story, but is currently a weaved web of philosophical twists and heart-breaking character beats. I’m sure Honkai: Star Rail has the potential to develop similarly, but what we’ve got during launch is a bit of a mess. The game kicks off with a bang, and I immediately loved the sci-if setting and some of the initial world-building thrown your way. Stellarons summon Antimatter Legions and cause natural disasters. You have a friend named March 7th who was found floating in a chunk of space-ice before the Astral Express rescued her. Cool, I’ve got some questions but I’m also excited!
On a dime, though, the writing of Honkai: Star Rail can flip from endearing sci-fi and charming character moments to incomprehensible poetics. Characters will randomly drop their natural speaking tone and deliver vague sentences on the cycles of life, and multiple times I’d get hit by exposition overload when a character drops ten different made-up faction and god-entity names in a single sentence. I spent just as many moments smiling along with fun character interactions as I did zoning out and struggling to make sense of lore terminology and side-quest jargon.
Thankfully, the gameplay stringing along these inconsistent story beats is fun and flashy in equal parts. Right off the bat, it’s clear that Honkai: Star Rail isn’t nearly as unique or innovative on the gameplay front as Genshin Impact was, but I don’t mind that at all. This game is a pretty standard turn-based party RPG – your four selected characters battle enemies and bosses, utilising a Basic Attack, a Special Attack, an Ultimate attack, and helpful passive/secondary abilities on each character to spell victory. There really isn’t too much depth here in terms of the raw mechanics – Basic Attacks gives you a point, and you can spend these points to use Special Attacks – then, once a character deals or experiences enough damage, their Ultimate meter is full and you can trigger that attack regardless of turn-order.
There are minor elements of customisation at play for each character, but don’t expect gear-builds or humongous skill trees. Characters have equippable Light Cone cards and six-tiered upgrades they can access to enhance their abilities, and this is where the gacha specter hanging over the game’s head springs forth. Much like Genshin Impact, the main story path of this game can be cleared without spending a single dollar. To acquire Light Cone cards or get the duplicate characters needed to expand abilities, though, you need to play the odds in the Warp menu – spending premium currency for a random chance at Light Cones or new characters. You can slowly earn this premium currency in-game, but at the end of the day, light-spending on some Warp summons or premium Battle Pass unlocks will become mandatory if you choose to dive into the deeper aspects of the game.
When you aren’t in-battle or staring at the abysmally low percentages for paid character summons, Honkai: Star Rail looks and feels like a premium console-game experience. You can explore fully 3D environments and dungeons, talk to NPCs, trigger silly dialogue, find hidden chests, and soak in the super gorgeous visuals. The game gets a major pass from me for not having revolutionary combat or upgrade mechanics simply because existing in the world is so fun and satisfying. I love strolling through town and seeing what the characters get up to, and poking into the corners of dungeons to find treasure or hidden battles is a blast.
Honkai: Star Rail doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s definitely one of the prettiest wheels I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to judge a game like this that is so clearly designed to build and expand upon what’s being presented during launch, but there’s plenty of promise here. The story can get a little too obtuse and the combat mechanics aren’t exactly groundbreaking at the moment, but it’s all still fun enough to breeze through and appreciate. It isn’t a Genshin Impact successor by any means, but it’s such a different experience tonally and mechanically that there’s no way it ever would have been. It’s a different flavour of free-to-play that gamers who didn’t gel with Genshin Impact might have a better appreciation for. It’s astounding to see how far that game has come since launch, so I have high hopes that Honkai: Star Rail will grow bigger, better, and a little more understandable as time goes on.
