Honkai: Star Rail Review

Boobs. I mean…space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Astral Express. Its mission: to seek out Stellarons and contain them before they wreak further havoc; to join forces with and to do battle against space gods with weird names; to seek out new memes and new fourth walls to break; to boldly go where admittedly a lot of people have gone before. I have no idea how to segue out of that, but it’s pretty accurate either way. If you’ve played Genshin and enjoyed it, so long as you’re at least partially a fan of turn-based combat you’re going to likely enjoy Honkai: Star Rail. If you’re new to all of this but have had Star Rail ads superglued to the inside of your eyelids for the last few months and are interested in the nuts and bolts, or you’re just a bit more intrigued with what all the well-supported, lifted, and separated points are then let me give you a bit more to work with.

Despite sharing a similar name, Honkai: Star Rail isn’t necessarily a sequel to the previous Honkai: games MiHoYo has produced, nor are those older games required reading beyond maybe being able to pick up on some nods here and there. Star Rail stands on its own, and while it shares an immense number of mechanics and systems with its sister property Genshin Impact, it isn’t exactly the same experience. I say that, but if you were to give an elevator pitch to someone on what Star Rail is, you’d almost be obligated to say it’s a turn-based Genshin Impact in space because…well because that’s pretty much what it is – though that’s not to be dismissive of it.

Just like Genshin, Star Rail is releasing with a certain amount of story content to play through and has similar “end game” ways to spend your time whilst you eagerly await the next season of plot to be delivered to your virtual doorstep. There are a host of characters you’ll both meet and have a chance to play with, and as of this writing the next round of content isn’t particularly far away. In fact, they plan on holding to the same absolutely unhinged release schedule for content that Genshin Impact players enjoy – which is to say just about every six weeks you’ll have new content to work through and events to participate in. They’ve really got this stuff down to a science.

You’re a Nameless (not literally – it’s a moniker) and quickly adopted Trail Blazer. A team of well-endowed spacefaring heroes, the Trail Blazers are a rag-tag group with the goal of restoring the Star Rail – the interstellar rail system created by the Aeon Akivili the Trailblaze which fell into disrepair along with the destiny of Akivili. If only a quarter of that made sense, don’t worry you’re not alone. Go diving into the game wikis and you’ll be able to untangle the surprisingly intricate tapestry that’s Star Rail’s world-building and lore. The game itself spends more of its time introducing and elaborating upon its initial cast of characters, and the greater world lore is something you’ll hear lots about but usually in ways that don’t allow you to connect a lot of dots in a straightforward way. This is further muddied early on with some not particularly strong writing or line deliveries, but thankfully as you progress and improve your skills in battle, so too does the writing and delivery.

The story takes itself relatively seriously, though of course there are moments of levity. I wouldn’t say that what’s presented is a would-be page-turner, but the currently available story has a few great moments and payoffs including one of the most epic anime-ass boss battles I’ve experienced in years. That said, there’s an interesting dichotomy of writing styles that Star Rail presents which you’ll no doubt eventually stumble upon as you explore the environments and start clicking on everything that looks interactable. Side quests and…canned events, let’s say, are a different animal entirely.

There’s an ice cream parlour selection of fourth wall breaks and running gags that you may or may not come across but when you do, while jarring, are almost always good for a laugh if only for the ridiculousness of the idea. I got a great amount of enjoyment just imagining how much fun whatever lucky writer was assigned the task of writing multistage quest event exposition and dialogue for the most mundane things on screen. Other games have done this kind of thing in the past, and while it’s almost always a gamble as to whether or not it lands, I applaud the effort here and look forward to whatever might come next in new zones to be released.

Of course, for a game that makes the majority of its money from people wanting to have certain characters, Star Rail spends a lot of time focusing on the many characters you’ll be able to play with should you acquire them. For obvious reasons, the five-star characters often get more attention here, but everyone has their own questlines for you to complete so you can learn more about them. Not everyone is enthralling, but I can’t say that any of the characters are boring. Mildly annoying, perhaps, but certainly not boring. I suspect that your mileage will vary based on your own personal tastes, but whether you like the characters or not they’re all quite well written.

As mentioned earlier with the totally accurate elevator pitch, Honkai: Star Rail is a turn-based game in the year of our lord 2023 – something Square Enix is still convinced shouldn’t be possible with humanity’s current understanding of particle physics. Ironically, the combat system most closely resembles that of Final Fantasy XIII. There’s a similar rock-paper-scissors of elements like fire, electric, wind etc. that are chiefly for matching up vs enemies weak to said elements. Use the appropriate element for the appropriate enemy and you’ll do damage to what is essentially a stagger bar. While you don’t need to clear the stagger bar to do health damage, making a point to do so can certainly make your life a lot easier.

Each character has a standard attack, a skill, and an ultimate – the latter of which you can use after gaining enough energy during battle. It’s not an ATB system like FF7, so you’re not on the clock and can take your time strategizing if needed. Instead, there’s a turn bar that denotes who attacks in what order, and that order can of course be influenced by things like character speed stats as well as skill use and events that happen throughout battle. The best example of this is that you can activate a character’s ultimate at any time – even if it isn’t their turn. This is especially important when managing more difficult battles, and while nobody is likely ever going to accuse Star Rail of having a complicated battle system, I’m sure like Genshin it will become necessary to master it to be able to tackle the end game content. For the more pedestrian encounters, and thanks to being turn-based, Star Rail also allows you to speed up animations in combat and even auto battle if you’re in an area in which you needn’t worry about the local fauna putting up much of a fight.

While I appreciate the action combat that Genshin Impact has, and the nuance of swapping characters in and out of combat in real time, I always thought it would feel better as a turn-based game, so it’s nice to be able to enjoy that with Star Rail and I think they’ve done an admirable job here. There are some nagging bits such as hearing the same limited character voice lines in combat ad infinitum, or just how damage spongey some enemies become. Perhaps the most grating part of combat is that, even when you aim to maximize its effectiveness, shield-breaking an enemy can often result in minimal payoff with the enemy immediately recovering and executing an attack in the same turn which can make playing strategically feel a bit wasted on occasion. It would be nice to see combat reward strategy a bit more instead of brute force, but the balance is reasonable enough as it stands. Of course, some of this can be mitigated by simply having substantially more powerful characters, but I don’t necessarily mean just by way of having your credit cards bear the weight of the world’s financial irresponsibility in the pursuit of five-star characters.

Listen, we can’t all be born into old money oil baron families. Some of us come by our gacha characters honestly. Thankfully, like Genshin before it, Honkai: Star Rail doesn’t ask you to have every top-tier character to be able to complete its story content or even do most if not all of the end-game content. There are enough ways to freely acquire pulls, whether it be for the current character banner or the standard banner, and while it can take time and luck even completely free-to-play players will have a stable of five-star characters. Like I said, however, building a powerful team doesn’t end when you get the characters.

Each character can use a light cone (which serves basically as a weapon) and a set of relics (more or less armour and accessories). Each of these can be acquired by various means and can individually be upgraded with materials and resources you collect. Furthermore, while you can of course level up a character, you can also level a character’s abilities. Finally, if you pull a duplicate character from a banner or acquire a duplicate via an event or other mission, it unlocks an Eidolon (lots of final fantasy references in here). Eidolons have 6 total tiers and unlocking them can prove to come with major power spikes for the character. If this immediately sounds like a way to bait whales into spending a fortune getting all Eidolons for five-star characters…well, you’re probably right. In fairness, without spending a dollar I unlocked all six tiers for one of my four-star characters so it’s not exactly without precedent to enjoy these benefits without selling a kidney.

Upgrading items and characters is where a lot of extra time can be spent for those looking to really get the most out of their team. Not all materials required to do so are readily available without spending Trailblaze Power. Star Rail is a gacha at heart, and having soft or hard gates on how much you can do of certain activities in a given 24-hour period is a main mechanic. This is ultimately a way to help ensure players come back daily, and in doing so theoretically increases the odds they’ll spend money on the game. Thankfully, only at the true end game when you’re trying to absolutely maximize your team does this restraint particularly become a hindrance. It does mean you’ll want to learn to look ahead to see what your upcoming needs are to map out the best way to spend your power, but otherwise just know that you’ll want to manage your resources accordingly. The good news is that if you do want to get on top of these things, there are communities out there with dudes and dudettes crunching numbers and doing advanced math in an effort to min-max every facet of the game which then you can mimic for maximum degeneracy.

So, what do you do when you’ve assembled the anime Avengers and armed them to the teeth with everything you could get your hands on? Well, like any self-respecting live service game, it gives you a treadmill to run on since you’re ignoring the one you bought two years ago and mostly use as a clothes rack now. The treadmill of Star Rail is made up primarily of two zones: the Forgotten Hall, and the Simulated Universe. The Forgotten Hall consists of a series of boss challenges of increasing difficulty, but the real revolving door is the Simulated Universe which acts as a sort of rogue-lite dungeon runner. Each stage consists of several rooms with branching paths, some that have battles and others encounters with a chance to gain further power for your current run. There are multiple levels of difficulty for each stage, and so if you do manage to conquer the initial levels, more challenges and greater rewards await. This is where all your hard work or copious amounts of disposable income will be tested most, and where you can truly be put to the test once you’ve cleared the available story content between releases.

Speaking of boobs, I mean…visuals…how does all this stuff look? Well, it looks pretty damn good. Like Genshin before it, Honkai: Star Rail scales remarkably well from mobile up to the PC and while I can’t say it’s the most optimized experience it’s a damn sight better than most of the PC ports these days. It’s a bit disappointing that we weren’t given some more open areas that Genshin Impact affords, and I’m sure some of that has to do with the combat system choice, but I would like to see some compromise since we know MiHoYo are capable of some beautiful landscapes and world design in general. For now, the zones are mostly confined spaces, maze-like corridors, and the occasional distant land that you can’t get to but serves as a backdrop to more maze-like corridors. There’s also a reliance on storyboard cutscenes more than the fully animated ones we see more frequently in Genshin Impact, but I suspect that stuff will pick up more once Star Rail has become a proven money maker. Combat animations at the very least are all really well done, feel unique, and has enough visual interest that even after 40 or 50 hours I didn’t tire of seeing many of them, and I think it’s impressive to see a game have this level of general polish given the galactic leap in hardware it's expected to run on.

The soundtrack is also quite good, though, like some of the writing, the genre switch-ups can be jarring. I can’t say I’ve heard a bad piece of music in the game yet, and there are standouts like the accompanying piece to the full-blown anime boss fight I mentioned earlier. Outside of the typical orchestral pieces you’d expect, you’ll experience everything from bordering on dubstep all the way up through something you’d have heard while torturing yourself with re-runs of The OC. There’s quite a list of tracks, and you’ll be able to collect discs for play on the Astral Express which is a nice touch.

It's still a bridge too far for many people whenever they see a game with gacha, no matter how good the game may be, and I can respect that. Gacha isn’t my favourite thing in the world either, but I can’t deny that Genshin Impact and now Honkai: Star Rail is making serious headway in regard to bridging the worlds of standard gaming and mobile gacha monetization. It’s kind of hard to argue with 30 to 50 hours or more of completely free RPG content of this quality, and there aren’t many games as a service cranking out content on this scale every six weeks – let alone, once again, for free. Nobody is going to mistake Star Rail for a true blockbuster game, but it gets close for a lot less money. In a market where the going rate for a broken, poorly designed game is $70, it’s not surprising so many people are flocking to experiences like this instead. If you’re a fan of or can tolerate a bit of over-the-top anime stylings, turn-based combat, and a dash of degenerate gambling, Honkai: Star Rail is a great way to spend some time whether you’re on the go or at home.