Honkai: Star Rail Review

ign.com:

Honkai: Star Rail starts with a bang, serenading you with a symphony and blowing up a space station. You quickly ground yourself in a world with code-locked chrome doors, mech-like invaders with bladed arms, and rooms with monitors spread across the walls. Its hook of a prologue gives just enough that you can see why the story and gameplay are worth sticking around for without grinding. Charming characters, engaging combat, and carefully crafted worlds blend together into a game with enough content to keep you entertained for well over 50 hours, using polished versions of the progression systems from Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact to create HoYoverse’s best RPG yet.

HoYo has a reputation for crafting gacha games with a strong emphasis on story, and Honkai: Star Rail lives up to it. You play as the Trailblazer, an amnesiac protagonist who travels planet to planet on a train-like spaceship-like train called the Astral Express. It becomes a story surrounding the train’s crew, their backstories, and the different planets they visit. The story has its own twists and turns with some questionable pacing, but eventually it leads to an entertaining outcome that kept me wanting more.

Major story arcs dip into the city of Belobog’s political conflict and its poverty-stricken Underworld. It also balances darker themes like loss with lighthearted jokes, some of which reference pop culture or RPG cliches. Weaving these threads together puts the spotlight on other characters and makes the overall story more cohesive as a whole. These arcs kept me up at night, grinding through levels just so I could get to the next quest.

Of course, the story is far from finished. HoYo still plans to add more in future updates like it has and still