Review: Honkai: Star Rail is a goofy but well-oiled space adventure

Space, anime, pretty much anything can happen. Wielding a comically tall bow that shoots gleaming bunny-shaped snowballs, March she meets a girl named Seventh. A secret organization steals the memories of strangers and wraps them in a bubble-like membrane. You step into the shoes of the Trailblazer, a physical vessel of mysterious cosmic forces that can wreak havoc on entire planets. Honkai: Starrail It presents a fragmented sci-fi world where the broken parts sparkle.

Honkai: Starrail Marks another big release from Hoyoverse, the studio behind breakout hits genshin impact and collapse impact 3rd. Honkai: Starrail is currently playable on mobile devices and Windows PCs (where we played for this review), and will eventually come to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. While being a fan of genshin impact and similar mobile games recognize some systems star railwhose designers take this game in a new direction by blending turn-based combat with more linear dungeon exploration rather than offering the player an open world.

You start playing as a trailblazer who has a cosmic force called Stellaron inserted into her body by a mysterious woman named Kafka. After the insertion process, Trailblazer forgets everything about his past except Kafka’s name. They wake up on a space station and meet Dan Heng and March Seventh, her two characters traveling from world to world aboard an interstellar train called the Astral Express.

As a Trailblazer, you’ll help two men wipe out the space station’s robotic enemy threat, and the leader of the Astral Express (a female Greek goddess named Himeko) will join your team in the hopes that you’ll find them. invites you to participate. More about your past. If you accept, your new colleagues will welcome you aboard a bougie plush lounge car led by a rabbit mascot named Pom Pom. increase.

Your next adventure follows a classic RPG plot. A catastrophe has struck the planet, turning its mild climate into an almost uninhabitable winter hellscape. Today, the people are trapped in a single steampunk city called Belobog. Some residents manage to live a prosperous life on an otherwise barren planet, but that’s due to a class split: the city is physically he divided into two discs. The upper disc consists of the wealthier administrative offices and city leaders known as architects, while the lower disc is home to the miners who extract the ore that powers both the lower and upper. part of the city. (Any final fantasy 7 Fans will recognize this general premise. )

In-game space exploration takes place in a much more linear format than space adventures genshin impact‘s open world.Forget climbing and diving star railUse enough waypoints in the game to teleport from map to map and run to each set point. Enemies spawn in some areas, such as the space station’s lower deck. Others function like city centers where you can get resources or talk to characters to unlock quests or complete requests. It offers players bite-sized adventures in settings ranging from glowing ore sections of underground mines, to cavernous interiors with towering sky ceilings perfect for Star Wars, to sunny but cold cities. The center of the town square in Russian style.

As you explore the space station, your characters (starting with a switchable trio) attack monsters while roaming the overworld, and use techniques to give buffs and other support before the battle begins. You can When you start a battle, you participate in turn-based combat. In this battle, every character has her 3 main moves (basic attack, skill, and ultimate). To win a battle, you must enlist different characters with different roles called paths and different combat types that work like element types. Certain combat types go up against others. Combat is turn-based, but back-and-forth battles ping-pong so fast that you can zoom in on the match. There are also settings that allow you to speed up gameplay and auto-battle during combat, further enhancing how fast-paced the battle feels.

Image: Hoyoverse via Polygon

Building these characters into a formidable combat team and understanding what goes into their stats is much more complex than turn-based combat mechanics. level, weapon (star rail light cones), weapon level, a set of equippable items called relics, their relic stats (randomly assigned), relic level, Additional boosts from skill trees called traces, and how many eidolons a character has (which are powers and boosts granted when rolling multiple copies of a character). star rail is also a gacha game. This means you can earn an in-game currency called Stellar Jade that you can spend on random chances to acquire better characters.

After reading that description, you may be overwhelmed. How the heck does the Relic system work? And what happens when you can’t smash enough Star Orbs to get the character you want? Not too bad, actually. Even within the short review period, the process of leveling the characters felt like a reasonable system. Regular players seem to be able to chip away at all these different gameplay elements over time and build strong teams.

star rail combines a combat system with a brilliant animation style that in some ways looks like it came straight out of the anime. Hoyoverse appears at full power in animations of various characters’ special moves. Some are gorgeous. Trailblazers use bats with spectacular shimmering visual effects vibrating with specks of neon blue, yellow and black electric pulses. Some people are capricious. Healer Natasha throws the teddy bear into the air and shoots it with a grenade launcher. After that, gifts that heal allies will fall. Himeko summons the satellite Death Laser, which annihilates her enemies while sipping tea.

Image: Hoyoverse

Each animation shows a lot about each character and their story. For example, when the characters first arrive at Jaliro 6, they end up on the lower disc, where they meet a girl named Clara. Although she is petite and docile, she is a recurring advocate on behalf of a group of misfits living in the Undercity, determined to make a difference. And on the battlefield, Mecha summons her anime-ready giant robot, her friend Svarog, to cut through her enemies. Her Ultimate A stunning up-camera angle of her shows Clara overwhelmed with fear beneath Svarog during her attack. Clara leans over her, shielding her with her bright red eyes and staring straight at her enemies. It’s striking to see how small Clara looks in this moment, and how her guardians menacing as she charges in for a laser attack. Shows care.

I’ve played through the game’s story to the end of my character’s journey in Jarilo-6.It’s a relatively interesting plot, but what’s more noteworthy is the general tone of the game. genshin impact There are certainly goofy moments that relate to more important topics, telling the story of a god that takes on a sort of mythical quality. star rail It has much lighter notes that feel more youthful and less serious.

For example, many characters point out how weirdly the Trailblazers talk because from 2023 they talk like an internet-savvy person on Earth. Trailblazer eventually gets his hands on a phone, which he uses to text another character at one point to “please~”. . A mailbox is more than just a mailbox. Investigation may reveal that someone stuffed sausages into a narrow slip, perhaps mistaking it for a trash can.

Best of all, March 7th buddy and Dan Heng GenshinMarch 7th is perfect girly pop and if she just wants to take a cute selfie together and she thinks the conversation options you’ve chosen are silly, she won’t be afraid to call you out. Dan Heng, on the other hand, is the cool, calculating type and adds a welcome dose of tension to the party, even if I personally think he’s too strong for the March 7th point.

Image: Hoyoverse via Polygon

But before bonding with new friends and embarking on a journey to Jarilo-6, the game offers Trailblazers a choice. Either take the Astral Express or stay on the space station. As I continue to talk to Himeko, it seems that your insistence on chatting with her on all topics makes Trailblazer reluctant to join the journey. I asked what it means to be a blazer. Traveling, she tells me, isn’t even about going to new places. she says.

Her comments capture the feeling of enduring a journey that feels both new and familiar. In it, making your own way doesn’t mean treading new ground, it’s treading it again and discovering something new. It captures the present moment as the product itself. Honkai: Starrail is the Hoyoverse’s third major release, marking another mobile game in the studio’s ever-growing catalog of games. The Hoyoverse are on the same path again.

in many ways, Honkai: Starrail Shows improvements to previous Hoyoverse creations. The game avoids excess in an ever-expanding world. Genshin, instead creating rigorously designed linear worlds and dense systems from start to finish. Fight to save the world with a dazzling snow bunny, texting new friends in the meantime. star railThe design leaves plenty of room for building out other aspects of the game. Combining a sophisticated turn-based system with a comedic, light-hearted writing style, star railIt seems that your future route will go smoothly.

Honkai: Starrail Released April 26th on iOS, Android, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Hoyoverse. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, but Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased via affiliate links.discoverable Additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy can be found here.