Play Honkai: Star Rail Now
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Play nowAll aboard the Astral Express! We got our hands on Honkai: Star Rail, so read on to learn what to expect when starting out and our review of the game!
Honkai: Star Rail Review Score Explanation
Honkai: Star Rail Review Video
Honkai: Star Rail Score Explanation
| Overall | Honkai Star Rail is shaping up to be a decent Gacha RPG that's only hampered so far by its gacha rates. We’re still waiting for the game’s first batch of content updates, which may call for a better (or worse) score. |
|---|---|
| Story | Good worldbuilding, interesting plot, and decent character interactions make me feel like I'm watching a wholesome anime Space Opera. Nothing like the works of Leiji Matsumoto, but the Astral Express crew and their exploits are entertaining enough to keep me logging in and playing. |
| Gameplay | The turn-based combat didn't slow down the game as first feared, and it's simple enough for anybody to just play a few matches on the go. The ultimate skill animations are nice to look at, and there's a bit of depth to the combat because of the elemental typing. It’s a shame that there’s no Co-Op component yet, though it might come in the future. |
| Visuals | Just like Genshin Impact, the graphics in HSR are simple but effective. The characters are well-designed overall, though some of the Jarillo VI characters appear to be over-designed. |
| Audio | The music is serviceable, with electronic beats amping up battles and calming melodies kicking in during exploration bits. |
| Value for Money | The game is completely free, though if you want to get the characters you want from the gacha, you'd better be prepared to spend a good bit of money unless you're lucky because of the low drop rates for SSR characters. |
Honkai: Star Rail Review
Pros of Honkai: Star Rail
| Things Honkai: Star Rail Got Right |
|---|
 Surprisingly Fast Battle System Simple But Stylish Visual and Audio Direction Good Plot and Worldbuilding Interesting and Good-looking Characters |
Surprisingly Fast Battle System
What got me a bit leery at Honkai: Star Rail at first was its turn-based battle system. When I finally played it though, battles were much faster than I first thought. You go around the map and encounter enemies, but approaching them will bring you to a separate battle screen where you fight in turn-based combat. Just like in JRPGs like the Persona games. If you want to have an advantage, you can attack the enemy first, which either inflicts a status ailment on them or damages them before the fight even begins.
During battle, each of your party members has three moves: A single attack, a skill, and an ultimate skill. Do enough single attacks, and you can use the character’s skill. Survive long enough, and you’ll be able to unleash their ultimate attacks. All of them have nice animations and look pretty powerful. What you need to keep in mind, though, are elemental weaknesses.
If you attack an enemy with a character whose element they’re weak against, you’ll not only damage them but also deplete their toughness bar. Think of it like a ‘poise’ bar’ that, once depleted, will ‘break’ that character. This makes them more vulnerable to attack and pushes their turn down the action order. Taking advantage of this could spell the difference between winning or losing a boss battle.
So far, HSR’s combat is a downscaled version of what you’d expect of certain JRPGs, so I find it mostly okay. It’s complex enough to make you think, but easy enough to play on a phone. Also, did I mention that you can auto-battle most encounters? This function alone makes the grinding at least a little bearable, especially when you start farming Calyxes for leveling materials.
Simple But Stylish Visual and Audio Direction
From the people who made Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail is no slouch in the visuals department. Of course, the graphics are simpler and more anime-esque compared to other games, but miHoYo somehow makes the most of this limitation.
The space station looks vast, floating in the middle of a vacuum, the Interstellar Express sparkles as it flies through the cosmos, and Jarillo VI looks like a frozen wasteland. They all do the job sufficiently well. The character designs are also quite well-made. March 7th’s hair and eyes remind me of Paimon, while Dan Heng is a more reserved Zhongli. I don’t know if Pom-Pom will even compare to Paimon as a mascot, but he's cute in his own way.
Meanwhile, the music suite for the game is more or less serviceable, with electro and synth music going off while you beat Antimatter Legion soldiers up in the Herta Space Station, and flutes and violins playing a jaunty and uplifting tune as you walk the streets of Belobog. While skulking around in the Underground, you can hear drums and violins, giving off a wilder, more dangerous feel.
Good Plot and Worldbuilding
I’ll have to admit that the beginning kind of threw me off, with characters spouting off lore terms here and there like ‘Interastral Peace Corporation’, ‘Genius Society’, or ‘Trailblazers’. But as I progressed through the game, I got used to them. You see, Honkai Star Rail is chock full of lore that makes its worlds at least entertaining to be in.
What is the nature of the Herta Space Station, or the nature of the Wubbaboos, or how the Herta Department of Implement Arts plans to fleece the IPC, all this can be read in books scattered all over the levels. Plus the design of the worlds can clue you in on how they came to be.
Belobog, the last human settlement on Jarillo VI, is full of heaters, tram lines, and three-wheeled cars, showing that they’ve regressed to an early 20th-century level of development because of the Eternal Freeze, while everyone else in the galaxy is flying around in space. Underneath the city, however, lies the Underground, where people mine precious ores for the surface in exchange for supplies, even if they’ve not allowed to go back to the surface anymore.
A gacha game’s story can be a really big selling point for some players, and Honkai: Star Rail is looking pretty good in that department. The plots look average at first glance, but it’s really the characters and their interactions that make the story shine.
Interesting and Good-looking Characters
Now that we’re on the subject of characters, I’ll have to say that the initial wave of characters we’ve been introduced to in HSR are all great, funny folk. The crew of the Astral Express, for example, is composed of a girl found in a block of ice, a dense tea drinker with a mysterious past, a navigator who’s as beautiful as her coffee is terrible, a former animator, and a walking stuffed toy with a hat. All of them have their own quirky personalities, and I won’t blame you if you start feeling that you’re the only sane person on the train. Or the galaxy, for that matter.
All of them are designed rather well. Like I said earlier, some of them can be a bit overdone, though that’s something to expect from gacha game character designs in general. March 7th looks cute with her camera and coat, Dan Heng looks good in that coat, Himeko looks very suave with the military coat over a white dress, and Mr. Welt is probably one of the classiest men in the galaxy with the cane and glasses. Honkai Star Rail may lack social features, but it definitely not lacking in the fashion department.
Cons of Honkai: Star Rail
| Things That Honkai: Star Rail Can Improve |
|---|
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Low Gacha Rates, Hard to Reroll Underdeveloped Social Features Occasionally Awkward Dialogue |
Low Gacha Rates, Hard to Reroll
Call it terrible luck, but out of the 30 pulls I’ve done with the beginner banner so far, I only got one character, and it was a dupe. The rest were all Light Cones (the “equipment” you give to your characters, like in any other gacha). That’s because Honkai Star Rail’s rate for an SSR character is 0.6%, while its rate for SR’s is 5.1%.
There’s a beginner banner that gives you a guaranteed 5-star character after 50 pulls, but otherwise you’ll have to shell out money for Oneiric Shards (which you then exchange for Stellar Jade, the money used to buy Star Rail Passes and Special Star Rail passes or grind the game like many other F2P players. If you wanna reroll, forget about it because miHoYo has removed the option for guest accounts, and the tutorial itself takes 30-40 minutes to complete.
Add to that the low SSR rates, and you’ll definitely spend more than a day just trying to pull your favorite character. There’s a rumored soft pity pull somewhere between your 65th and 75th roll, but who knows? I will get Himeko someday, but today is not that day.
Underdeveloped Social Features
I’ve played gacha games where you’re able to at least play co-op with friends, just like Genshin Impact or Tower of Fantasy. So it kinda threw me off that Honkai: Star Rail doesn’t have that many social features except for a friend list and support (borrow high-level character from your friends). It would’ve been great if we could also do some sort of co-op in HSR, though I think it’s hard to implement such a thing.
I’ve seen similar games like this where they were able to do PvP, though, with a tournament format complete with seasons. That game was ALICE Fiction, and that PvP component wasn’t implemented until months after launch. So miHoYo may also put a similar feature into the game in the future, though it might take a bit of time before that happens.
Occasionally Awkward Dialogue
Just a minor gripe, really. Sometimes, I’ve noticed that the scripts for the English dialogue were probably translated directly from Chinese or Japanese. Most of the gaffes come from Dan Heng, with gems such as ‘Arlan from the Security Department lost contact in the vicinity’. There are also mistakes in the dialogue here and there, which you will notice if you have subtitles on and see little letters above a word indicating a correction.
But really, it’s a small gaffe that can get fixed in future updates.
Honkai: Star Rail Story Plot
Set in the multiverse of Honkai Impact 3rd, Honkai: Star Rail puts you in the shoes of the Trailblazer. An intergalactic criminal named Kafka woke you up from your slumber and tasked you with joining the crew of the Astral Express – a train that travels through the stars. With you are four of the train’s crew members, who all have their reasons for riding the star rail.
But you know nothing about your own purpose. Plus, you are potentially the vessel for a weapon that could cause devastation on a planetary scale…
Honkai: Star Rail again follows in the footsteps of Genshin Impact, being a gacha RPG. The only difference is that instead of fighting enemies in real-time, you will fight them in turn-based combat with a party of characters. Each character has their own corresponding element and Path (or class), which dictates their skills. They also have their own weapons and equipment.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a miHoYo game without a gacha system. To get your hands on other playable characters and weapons, you’ll have to use Star Rail Passes to “Warp” them in. These passes can only be bought with the game’s in-game currency, which you can either accumulate as you play or buy outright with real-world money.
Who Should Play Honkai: Star Rail?
Honkai: Star Rail is Recommended if You Enjoy:
• JRPGs like the Persona games
• Science fiction games like Phantasy Star
• Genshin Impact
One of Honkai: Star Rail’s biggest pulls is its battle system, which is a simplified version of what you can see in JRPGs. Fans of JRPGs, however, will like the game for the strategy involved in playing it despite the game’s simplicity. Those who also liked specific JRPGs like Phantasy Star will also feel at home playing HSR because of how it mixes anime aesthetics with science fiction.
Of course, fans of miHoYo and, in particular, their past game Genshin Impact will like HSR as well if only because of its visuals and plot.
Is Honkai: Star Rail Worth It?
Worth it as Free-to-Play Player; If You’ll be a Dolphin, Might as Well Whale the Game
Honkai: Star Rail has just the right amount of content to keep Free-to-Play players sated, though not necessarily with the characters they want. If you're playing as an F2P, you’ll have to play the game daily to spend Trailblazer Energy and do the dailies, or risk getting left behind. So you’ll be trading time instead of money to play the game. Still, the story so far is worth the effort.
If you’re planning to be a Dolphin, though, with how low the game’s SSR drop rate is, you might as well be a whale to make sure you get the characters you want.
How Honkai: Star Rail Matches Up to Similar Games
| Games Similar to Honkai: Star Rail | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
 Genshin Impact |
The two games are entirely different experiences, almost night and day if not because of the similarities in their gacha rates and certain gameplay mechanics. But HSR will scratch a sci-fi itch that Genshin Impact won’t be able to do, so play it when you’re feeling like you want to go up to the stars. | Genshin Impact’s action is a lot faster than HSR, and the world is much more explorable. So if you don’t like linear RPGs, HSR might not be your cup of tea. |
 Honkai Impact 3rd |
HSR might throw off Honkai Impact 3rd fans because of the departure from real-time combat to turn-based strategy, but the gameplay in HSR is surprisingly fast for a JRPG-style game. Honkai Impact 3rd fans might like it. | But those who really liked the faster-paced battles in Honkai Impact 3rd might want to stick to that game instead since HSR goes at a rather different pace in both gameplay and story. |
 RAID: Shadow Legends |
HSR definitely has a one-up on RAID when it comes to graphics, with better-looking characters, and a better-looking user interface. HSR also has a (slightly) higher SSR drop rate than RAID. | But RAID’s Western fantasy aesthetic may be more appealing to players who didn’t like Genshin Impact’s cutesy anime aesthetics. |
How Honkai: Star Rail Matches Up to Games Coming out in April 2023
| Games That Came Out Recently | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
 Dead Island 2 |
Honkai: Star Rail is a more laid-back and wholesome adventure compared to the blood and guts in Dead Island 2. Plus its Space Opera tale is much more refreshing than Dead Island’s “zombie apocalypse but in LA” story. | The action is a lot faster in Dead Island 2. Also, since HSR is a gacha game, it might be much cheaper to get a full game with Dead Island 2 compared to spending a huge amount of money to buy gacha Star Rail passes. |
 Star Wars Jedi: Survivor |
Honkai Star Rail’s anime aesthetic might be more appealing compared to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Though if you’re a big sci-fi fan in general, why not play HSR and buy Jedi: Survivor to play while waiting for your Trailblaze Power to regenerate? | Jedi:Survivor just seems like one of those big games that you just can’t miss if you can help it, considering the epic production values and how great the first game was. You’ll probably be putting HSR aside for a bit just to finish it. |
 Minecraft Legends |
Honkai Star Rail is a game you can play on the go without much thinking. Though Minecraft Legends can also be like that, HSR is much more fulfilling to play on the go, on your phone, without much hassle. | But Minecraft Legends still has that heroic feeling that you can’t get just yet from HSR. Plus, ML is set in a beautiful open world while HSR, while relatively open, isn’t open-world at all. |
Honkai: Star Rail Product Information
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| Title | Honkai: Star Rail |
|---|---|
| Release Date | April 26, 2023 |
| Developer | miHoYo |
| Supported Platforms | Android, iOS, PC, PS4/PS5 |
| Genre | Gacha Turn-Based RPG |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | N/A |
| Official Website | https://hsr.hoyoverse.com/ |
