With our interactive Hoyoverse Honkai Star Rail Review, explore the exciting world of Hoyoverse. Explore this aesthetically amazing mobile game in depth to learn more about its epic battles, captivating characters, and compelling story. Discover the mysteries of the stars as you journey across beautiful vistas on a cosmic quest. In this cosmic journey, feel the rush of tactical combat and let your inner hero go. Our in-depth examination will offer priceless insights and professional analysis, ensuring that you are fully prepared to go off on your celestial voyage through the Hoyoverse.
Honkai: Star Rail gets things going right away by blowing up a space station and serenading you with a symphony. A world of code-locked chrome doors, mech-like invaders with bladed arms, and rooms with monitors arranged across the walls quickly grounds you. The prologue’s hook offers just enough information to allow you to understand without having to grind why the plot and gameplay are worthwhile. With the help of refined iterations of the growth mechanisms from Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact, the finest RPG in the HoYoverse universe is made up of endearing characters, compelling combat, and meticulously designed locations.
Honkai: Star Rail lives up to HoYo’s reputation for creating gacha games with a focus on narrative. You take control of the Trailblazer, an amnesic protagonist who journeys between planets on the Astral Express, a spaceship-like train. It develops into a narrative centered on the passengers, their backstories, and the several planets they travel to. Although the plot has some pace issues and its own twists and turns, it eventually comes to a satisfying conclusion that made me want to read more.
Major story arcs briefly mention the political unrest in Belobog and its impoverished Underworld. It also strikes a mix between serious subjects like loss and humorous gags, some of which include pop culture or role-playing game references. Other characters are highlighted as a result of weaving these threads together, which also strengthens the narrative as a whole. I stayed up all night working through these arcs in order to advance to the next mission.
The story is obviously far from over. As it did and will with Genshin Impact, HoYo still intends to add more in subsequent releases, but Honkai: Star Rail already does a good job of gradually disclosing little facts about each character and generating scenarios that highlight the various sides of their characters. The campaign begins with an intriguing mystery that immediately piques your interest and doesn’t let up until the end.
Hoyoverse Honkai Star Rail
You must grind through battles and objectives in order to get experience because you can’t access some plot quests or unlock specific skills until you reach a particular level. However, I valued that level-locked stuff as a justification to travel outside of the main story quests and develop characters before facing more difficult foes.
Reaction to Microtransactions
Since Honkai: Star Rail is a free-to-play gacha game, some players will find it easier than others depending on the characters and equipment they are fortunate enough to obtain. Even if you aren’t paying, it is still set up in a fair manner. It provides you with a ton of resources to get going, including at least 80 unrestricted banner pulls (which award you characters and equipment) and ongoing prizes from the site content. Additionally, the regular banner approximately 50 pulls in will always provide at least one 5-star character (one of the strongest teammates available).
There are numerous possibilities to choose from since it currently provides seven characters for free. Even if your experience with Honkai: Star Rail will be different, you don’t need fortune (or money) to enjoy it.
Because it costs only $5 and gives you 300 Oneiric Shards right away, the Express Supply Pass is a favorite because it can hasten your advancement. To receive the whole 2,700, though, you must log in for 30 days straight. Each Star Rail Pass costs 160 Stellar Jade, so that’s at least 16 Star Rail Passes total.
When you reach tier 30, a complimentary four-star Light Cone and Special Star Rail Passes are included in the Nameless Glory Battle Pass ($9.99). Purchase of the Battle Pass ensures that you will receive at least one viable competitive item because all of these Light Cones are viable in the current meta.
Honkai: Star Rail currently includes three primary worlds, and each of them contains a plethora of information tucked away in every crevice. By simply looking into random objects and conversing with your trip companions and NPCs, you can start a lot of interactions and discover new things. Even dealing with a single trash can in Belobog can cause your puzzled friends to respond. Every time you ride the Astral Express, even Pom-Pom, the conductor, appears to have something fresh to share with you.
Additionally, each Light Cone—a weapon-like card that you attach to your characters to increase their stats and give them unique abilities—has a bit of lore associated with it, sometimes connected to memories of playable characters. Additionally, there are a ton of in-game books and documents that I may or may not ever read but are available in case somebody wishes to dive even farther.
Honkai Star Rail Images
But without the satisfying advancement, it would all be for nothing. Honkai: Star Rail guides you gradually through the layers of progressively complex systems as you go, preventing newcomers from becoming overloaded with information all at once. In addition to the different drops you utilize to level everything up, there are separate leveling systems for your account, characters, abilities, planet (difficulty level), and two types of equipment. It can be difficult to remember everything at first when you’re first learning how to play because all these leveling goods arrive from various locations.
When learning to play, there may be a lot to keep in mind.
The only challenges that initially provide resources for character and item leveling are those with golden Calyxes. However, when characters advance in level, the list of materials you need to upgrade them grows. At level 20, all your character needs to advance to the next level are ascension books; at level 40, they also require resources relevant to their elemental type or role. Once you reach a certain level, two additional challenges—Crimson Calyxes and Stagnant Shadows—that contain these items become available.
The next step is to choose how to use your Trailblaze Power, which is the primary consumable resource required to earn rewards from these tasks. Do you wish to first level up the skills of your characters? Or do you wish to raise their Light Cone’s level? It becomes more difficult to complete them all in a single day without recharging your Trailblaze Power with consumables. When playing for free, such things happen at a pace that feels quick enough, but HoYo encourages impatient players with cash on hand to pay in order to advance more quickly.
With a turn-based battle system in Honkai: Star Rail, you have lots of strategic options to think about, which makes winning all the more exciting. I never got bored tinkering with team composition because each character is a combination of two types: a class (called a route) like damage dealer or support, and an elemental affinity akin to Pokémon.
Some teams might feature an ace defender instead of a healer or someone who buffs their own team members while debuffing the opposition. For example, if I give my strongest character a bonus, they can one-hit kill adversaries and receive an extra turn. I’ve also given my favorite shielder equipment that increases their defensive stat and increases the likelihood that they’ll burn enemies. Planning ahead can be just as crucial as what you do when the combat starts because you have the option of switching partners based on the weaknesses of the incoming adversaries.
Relics, which are pieces of equipment that you can equip on characters to increase their stats, are Honkai: Star Rail’s irritating continuation of the artifact system from Genshin Impact. The fact that the stat that grows when you level up is randomized, however, means that there are too many layers that depend on luck. It’s still feasible that the system will direct every boost toward the substat with the lowest value even if your Relic has at least three favorable ones. One Relic might, for instance, have four sub stats: attack, flat defense (as opposed to defense percentage, which is distinct), critical damage, critical rate, and critical rate.
The critical and attack numbers make it sound like the perfect relic for a character who deals damage, but if your luck decides to level up flat defense repeatedly, it can be entirely useless.
Even missions without fancy cutscenes that involved characters I felt a connection to make my heart race.
You’ll have to read a ton of material in Honkai: Star Rail and that’s just a sample. The voice acting in several of the events increased the drama and my interest. Because of their animated voice acting, NPCs’ lengthy explanations might be amusing, but you should frequently be prepared for a lot of text. In the main missions, the verbose speech makes sense because the small details add together to give you a clearer understanding of the plot. Even missions without fancy cutscenes that involved characters I felt a connection to make my heart race.
There are a lot of side activities that add interesting and even heartbreaking situations to the locations you visit. You do get to make some choices that could potentially damage the lives of some NPCs, but they don’t significantly alter the course of the plot.
That makes sense given that the plot is ongoing and there are only so many branching pathways the developers can design. Even if a well-known con artist makes people pleased with his lies, should you still throw him in jail? Should you kill a well-intentioned robot even though doing so would essentially take away their emotional intelligence and uniqueness in order to prevent a potential rampage? You can make fun of your crewmate’s clumsiness or point a finger at a nasty old man. It’s your decision, and it kept me interested in how the characters would respond to me and how my choices would turn out.
Some side quests, however, offer a wealth of information without requiring as much time or money. Finishing up unfinished side tasks starts to feel more like a chore than an achievement. They might be more engaging if they contained more secret character information, similar to the companion missions that concentrated on specific characters.
In any case, it’s much more than that. I could go on and on about all the small quality-of-life touches Honkai: Star Rail has that fans of previous HoYo games will appreciate, such as how its descriptions point out in-game terminology like “Break Effect” that may need clarifying and provide a definition when you click on it. If you don’t want to spend time calculating figures, you can use the Recommended Gear button to have Relics automatically selected for each character.
Additionally, in case you forget, each adversary has icons that point out their weaknesses before you even reach them. It is considerably more forgiving if you haven’t covered every single element in your party because they even have at least two weaknesses so that you don’t feel disadvantageous for lacking just one ingredient.