Genshin Impact by developer and publisher miHoYo—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by Nick
with a free-to-play copy downloaded from the PSN.Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Don’t let the fact that Genshin Impact is
a free-to-play game available for mobile put you off – it’s a quality game
whether you play it on your phone, PC or PlayStation. Certainly it shares a
good deal of DNA with Breath of the Wild, but it continues to get content
updates and refinements with a handful of notable twists that make Genshin
Impact its own game.
I was vaguely aware of Genshin Impact
when it was first announced. The colorful, anime-styled visuals were certainly
appealing and I can lose myself in a big action-RPG set in a fantasy world as
quickly as anyone, but at the same time? It wasn’t really at the front of my
to-play list. After all, my gaming schedule is usually dictated by the reviews
I have on my plate and I don’t get a lot of spare time for other games unless
it’s a slow period like the holidays.
One of our members of the team however,
Chris, had gotten into Genshin Impact almost from day one and continued to sing
its praises. I finally knuckled down to give it a try over the holiday season
and promptly managed to sink over one hundred hours into it. That escalated
quickly.
There are some pretty natural Breath of
the Wild comparisons, from the ability to climb everything, to the way the
world is visually presented to gliding over large swaths of land and more.
There are puzzles built into almost every corner of the world, and combat comes
down to a mixture of ranged and melee attacks where some enemies have weak
points and others you simply want to take advantage of the environment
(exploding barrels waiting for an arrow to strike them? Sure!). There were
certainly times early on where this familiarity made Genshin Impact pretty
approachable for me, if not feeling terribly original out of the gates.
However, as I continued to play and dig
into the systems a bit, I began to enjoy some of the other nuanced differences.
Probably the biggest theme throughout the game is its reliance on elements and
having a party of four characters at your disposal. Elements play a big part in
combat as well as puzzle solving. Throughout the continent there are puzzles
that range from being as simple as lighting the nearby torches to reveal a
treasure chest, to more complicated ones that require you hit certain items
with specific elemental charges within a set time to unlock a door or take down
a barrier.
Combat as a similar flavor, as you can
have a very powerful claymore swinging fire elemental character who deals
plenty of damage by himself – but deals significantly more when you have other
elements impacting your enemies such as electricity or water. Hitting a
character standing in water with an ice attack can freeze them – but sometimes
you want that elemental reaction where there is no water nearby and teaming up
a water user with a cryo character can cause that same reaction wherever you
need it. On the typical enemy none of this strategy is needed, but for some of
the game’s bigger menaces, there is a lot of benefit to combining elements like
this whenever possible.
Creating an effective party comes down to
a handful of factors. The first and most obvious is availability, as you do not
have access to all of the characters (more on that below). The next is
combining elements that complement one another well. The other is picking
characters who have complementary weapon styles too. My primary DPS character
uses a heavy two-handed sword, and I have a character who is skilled with a bow
(great for ranged or weak point targeted attacks), while the other two
characters in my party are a bit less weapon-focused and more about their
complementary skills. You use the directional pad to swap back and forth
between characters during a fight. So for example, an example battle’s ebb and
flow may look like this:
I start the fight with my bow-user,
pinging an enemy at distance to get the first shot in, and then as they get
closer, use one of her special abilities that creates a small electrical AOE
storm near her. I quickly pivot to my water mage to fire off a similar water
damage AOE that also persists for several seconds. Now every enemy in range gets
hit with a water / electricity combo. I then switch to my fire-user to do a
trio of fire damage attacks that cause an overload effect, compounding the
damage as I then move to my healer / wind magic user to do her attack that
‘swirls’ effects, making them hit a larger group and spreading the impact a bit
before switching back to my fire user, who also is my primary DPS. At that
point I use his massive claymore to finish beating the enemies to death.
If that sounds like a lot of activity in
a very short time, that’s because it is – and it definitely gives Genshin
Impact a different sort of pacing during combat. Now, not all battles go just
like that. That’s an example of what I might do with a small cluster of fairly
low-risk enemies. My approach might be completely different for a hulking ruin
guardian that has a couple of very specific weaknesses that might have me
relying on my bow-user more heavily. Or perhaps leaning more heavily on my
water mage against a massive fire plant because my primary DPS relies on fire
and is not going to be overly helpful in this fight. Add to it oddball elements
like rain and you can see how encounters have a fair amount of strategy when
they involve more challenging enemies.
As such, you will want to give some
thought to your group construction. When Genshin Impact starts, you have your
character (whom you can name, but is referred to as Traveler after a brief
introduction that sees a brother / sister duo split up by a powerful opponent.
You pick the sibling you want to play as and the story sees you trying to find
your missing sibling after that), who discovers an affinity towards wind magic.
Shortly after you meet a character who has fire magic. Not too long after that,
your party rounds out with some other elements and you have a core working
group, each with a different elemental affinity.
However, while Genshin Impact is free and
doesn’t lock any of its quests / zones behind any kind of a paywall, where it
does make its month is through its gacha system for acquiring more characters.
The ones you get via the story are obviously going to be weaker than the ones
you might pull via the Wish system, where you can spend a couple of different
currency at pulling new weapons and characters. This is a pretty popular
mechanic found in a variety of mobile games such as Fire Emblem Heroes or
Fate/Grand Order. Weapons make up the majority of what you will pull, and
getting a good one is of course a huge perk – but it’s really about the
characters.
Those character pulls come in a couple of
different flavors. There is a perpetual pool and there are some limited time
ones that introduce characters and weapons not always available at increased
rates. There are several ways to spend real world money on the game, buying
different currency or perhaps signing up for a monthly slow drip that gives you
primogems (the game’s primary / most flexible currency) on daily login. Now, I
don’t feel that the game requires you to spend money. I have twice done the $5
monthly bit since I enjoyed the game and wanted to kick a little money towards
the devs, and I’m someone who does a fair number of ‘daily’ games where I log
in for my free goodies, so there was little-to-no-risk I would miss multiple
days and squander my daily bonus.
That having been my only spend (outside
of the time I’ve spent playing that is), I have to say I feel as though I have
had some pretty good luck. Obviously everyone’s mileage will vary, but over the
last couple of months, I have pull four of the five-star characters (two were duplicates
– Mona, a water sorceress, but duplicates are spent powering up your original,
so it’s hardly a loss as those power-ups are pretty significant), and a 5-star
weapon. I have more characters than I know what to do with, so again – this is
how the devs make their money, but I don’t feel it has done anything to inhibit
my overall enjoyment of the game. I just know that pay mechanics are of high
importance to many potential players, and I wanted to fully explain how it
worked.
As fore the core gameplay, combat
generally feels pretty good (though occasionally the ragdoll physics can be
annoying when you get knocked off of a ledge or enemies flop into a weird spot
that makes it difficult to interact with them), exploration is often delightful
(as mentioned earlier, there is a lot of climbing, which can be a bit tedious,
but I thoroughly enjoy gliding around the expansive landscapes) and there is no
shortage of content here. Granted, that content can absolutely get somewhat
repetitive. After a couple of months of logging in daily and playing somewhat
heavily a few days per week, I’m starting to just now feel the grind as I near
the maximum adventure level (there is character level, which is reflective of
the character themselves, and adventure level which grants further growth of
the characters and increased world level). It certainly has helped that there
are daily adventures, lots of quests and more than that, the development team
continues to trickle in new content.
Some of these content drops are more
substantive than others. The lightweight ones tend to be new characters or
weapons, or maybe some small new mechanic. Larger ones have added an entire new
area (a frozen land where the cold can start to take a heavy toll on your characters),
or a fairly extensive lantern festival that spun off into a variety of small
quest chains that led to some rather sizeable rewards. In truth – Genshin
Impact is still an incomplete game. I haven’t touched on all of the various
gameplay systems at play here, but so far my primary character has only earned
access to wind and earth elements.
It stands to reason the way things are
structured, there will be new lands and more abilities for him to learn along
the way. Given how popular Genshin Impact has proven to be so far, it feels
safe to say that the development team still has a lot of different options in
front of them and they have talked a bit about big plans coming down the road.
Will Genshin Impact ever reach a ‘complete’ state? Hard to say as it seems to
be straddling the line between large action-RPG (not always single player –
there’s a co-op mode available after reaching a certain level as well) and a
game-as-a-service with regular updates.
Still, what is here is expansive and
generally speaking, a good deal of fun.
Summary
Genshin Impact certainly has obvious
parallels to Breath of the Wild, but the team has done a good job making sure
that this is very much its own game as well. It certainly feels quite polished
for being free and also playable on mobile. One might expect it to be a cheap
or short game, but Genshin Impact has proven to be anything but, and I’ve
certainly enjoyed my time with it – spanning well over one hundred hours, with
more content to come.
Score: 8 / 10
