Honkai: Star Rail (Chinese: 崩坏: 星穹铁道; pinyin: Bēnghuài: Xīngqióng Tiědào; lit. ‘Honkai: Star Dome Railway’) is a role-playing gacha video game developed by miHoYo, published by miHoYo in mainland China and by HoYoverse worldwide. It was released on April 26, 2023, for Windows and mobile devices; ports for PlayStation 4 and 5 are planned. It is the fourth installment in the Honkai series, drawing on characters from Honkai Impact 3rd, Tears of Thermis, and gameplay elements from Genshin Impact.
Gameplay
Honkai: Star Rail follows the gameplay conventions of classic Japanese role-playing games: players build up a roster of characters, and control a team of four of them in turn-based combat. Elements of open-world and dungeon exploration are present, with many mechanics and the gacha system carried over from HoYoverse’s action RPG Genshin Impact.
Story and setting
The game is set in a science fantasy fictional universe in which humanity follows the paths of godlike beings, called “Aeons”, and struggles to stave off a pervasive corrupting force, the “Fragmentum”. The player character, the “Trailblazer”, whose name and gender is chosen by the player, awakens without their memory aboard a space station, discovering that they are imbued with a disruptive cosmic entity, the “Stellaron”. They join a band of adventurers, the “Trailblazers”, traveling from world to world aboard the “Astral Express”, their space-faring train.
Development
Honkai: Star Rail was revealed in October 2021 at the end of the Honkai Impact 3rd online concert, Starfire Sonorant, then later on the game’s official YouTube channel. The game entered its first closed beta testing later that month. A second closed beta test was held between May and June 2022. A final closed beta test was held in February 2023 and prior to the release of the game. In April 2023, HoYoverse announced having 10 million pre-registered users.
Reception
Eurogamer recommended the game for its “delightfully goofy humour, charismatic voice cast, and truly magnificent combat”, despite the writers’ tendency to “give one sentence explanations for important details, yet spend eight paragraphs overexplaining the simplest plot twist”. Rock Paper Shotgun called the game “still in its early stages but (…) incredibly good fun to play”, comparing it to “Star Ocean, but if everyone was hotter and you could gamble”. The reviewer praised the combat system for being deep yet approachable, and noted that, like in Genshin, spending money was not necessary to progress, as all content in the game could be cleared with the characters players receive for free. PC Gamer appreciated Star Rail’s “impeccable visual style and strategic depth” and its “elastic tone, which fluctuates from the heroic optimism of a space opera, to the dark comedy of a Nier game, with a lot of Final Fantasy 14’s soap opera storytelling mixed in”. To the reviewer, the game’s main draw was its “sheer creativity” and that it “distills what’s most satisfying about turn-based RPGs: tactical, team-based decisions.”
