Zenless Zone Zero Review (PS5)

Live service may as well be a curse word among some enthusiast circles, but Chinese titan HoYoverse has the model on lock. The company’s cringey corporate motto exclaims “tech otakus save the world”; in truth, it just wants to take over the world. Indeed, with the introduction of Zenless Zone Zero, its current cadence will see it cycle through one major update for each of its flagship games every two weeks. If you already find most of your playing time monopolised by Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, then this all-new urban fantasy RPG will practically incarcerate your PS5 and throw away the key.

You play as a Proxy named Phaethon who’s an acclaimed problem-solver in the challenged setting of New Eridu City. The developer’s penchant for proper nouns means there’s an abundance of gobbledygook to sift through here, but effectively daily life has been disrupted by the existence of Hollows, strange otherworldly portals which transform their occupants into Ethereals – or, in simpler terms, angry, aggressive monsters. Working remotely using a souped-up super computer, you’re able to infiltrate these gateways and complete Commissions – effectively odd jobs or quests, to use tired gaming terminology.

The gameplay is perhaps the most stylish of all HoYoverse’s efforts yet, and feels like an evolved version of one of the studio’s older titles, Honkai Impact 3rd. However, considering many of you will be unfamiliar with that game, it works a little like a Devil May Cry-style character action affair, where quick transitions between Agents buff you in a variety of different ways. Much like with Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, the moment-to-moment gameplay is relatively basic, but it’s the unique possibilities made possible through pairing different combinations that elevate it beyond its core.

That’s not to say this is a simplistic button masher – it’s not. Characters handle differently and have unique advantages and disadvantages: Lucy, for example, is a baseball bat-wielding motorcycle gang member, who hits home runs onto the battlefield in order to burn enemies; Ellen Joe, meanwhile, the inaugural S-Rank banner character, is capable of freezing foes and triggering shatter damage. The sheer complexity of the systems can get headache-inducing when you’re reading through all the various status effects, but casuals will find a fervent drip-feed of dopamine from simply watching all the big numbers fly off their targets.

HoYoverse has, quite clearly, learned a lot from Honkai: Star Rail – and so you’ll find a streamlined suite of material gathering compared to the ageing Genshin Impact here. But the game does still require a PhD in free-to-play to get to grips with: a bounty of currencies, resources, skill checks, and time gates await, all filtered through a seemingly never-ending list of gameplay challenges and grinds. For the familiar, this is certainly a slicker offering than the Traveller’s toils in Teyvat, but the path to the perfect build is still undeniably obstructed through all sorts of irritations.

Nevertheless, the game feels like a prestige package to interact with. The animations, sprightly throughout, are absolutely sublime – and while the game loves the sound of its own voice far too much, the writing is laugh out loud funny at points. This is an off-the-wall experience, fully embracing of even the strangest sequences in Honkai: Star Rail, and thus it feels totally reasonable to clash with a sentient construction tool that’s fallen in love with an abandoned building. The release is unflinchingly confident in its own sense of style, and while it won’t appeal to everyone, it tickles this author’s pleasure receptors.

The same is true of the art style, which is just phenomenal if you can tolerate the current glut of anime-inspired content. New Eridu City itself harkens back to the early 2000 era of SEGA Skies™, blue like the ocean and bursting with colour and character. Some of the Agents may turn stomachs, flip-flopping from buxom babes with heaving cleavages to ear-splitting lolis in short shorts, but HoYoverse’s artists are at their most creative yet here, introducing a friendly-faced bear with boisterous bling and a butler who just so happens to be a wolf.

Outside of the core combat, there’s an arcade you can visit to play an extremely entertaining adaptation of Mr Driller, as well as a light business management segment which sees you running your own VHS rental store. And we’d be remiss not to mention the television-hopping navigation aspect, which is so off-the-wall it’s almost impossible to explain; effectively, during quests, you’ll find yourself traversing through different television screens, completing rudimentary puzzles like pushing switches and more. The developer gets really creative with this concept, even introducing a sequence which resembles Bomberman, although it has said it’s working on more traditional exploration gameplay too, and there are hints of that in the launch version.

And that’s perhaps a key jumping off point because, if Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail have taught us anything, it’s that what we’re playing today is merely the start. Zenless Zone Zero will be updated every six weeks with new characters, quests, locations, minigames, events, and more; while we can only review what’s in front of us, it’s important to underline that this is a game designed to grow and evolve, much like its cast of misfit characters.

We’d also be doing you a disservice if we didn’t discuss monetisation, which is sure to prove divisive. This is a gacha game and so, yes, there are microtransactions available allowing you to use real-world money to buy in-game currency which can be spent on draws for time-limited characters. While the system has more structure than true ambiguity, there is an aspect of gambling involved, as outside of the 180-pull guarantee, you’re never quite sure who or what you’re going to get. It’s important to note, however, that you can play the entire game free of charge, and if you invest wisely and save up the resources you earn though gameplay, it’s possible to unlock the Agents you want at no cost.

Conclusion

Zenless Zone Zero has the swagger of a game that knows it’s going to be a big success, and judging by its 50 million downloads at the time of publication, that confidence is not misplaced. In some ways this is a strange beast: artistically it’s all over the place, pulling from a litany of different sources and somehow stringing them all together into a cohesive, compelling whole. But at its heart it’s a character action game with a massive emphasis on team-building, and it’s a bloody good one at that.