Genshin Impact

BREATH OF THE… WEEBS.

Genshin Impact, without a doubt, is the most graphically impressive game I have seen on mobile to date. Its beautiful, cel-shaded anime look, combined with sweeping animations and gorgeous graphical effects is a sight to behold, blowing almost every other game in its genre out of the water. It’s not just looks either – Genshin boasts a rich, wide open world with no boundaries, plenty of quests and dungeons, enemy encampments, a complex and rewarding combat system, an engrossing, fullyvoiced story and four-player, crossplatform co-op. Wow.

Genshin is one of the first games of its type to fully embrace mobile as a primary operating system for an open world RPG, and impressively extends its reach across to PC, PS4 and (eventually) Nintendo Switch. This has resulted in a game that genuinely taxes flagship phones from only a few years ago and features a console level size to boot

– the full download clocks in at around 11GB. But this size and performance pressure is justified – the game ebbs and flows at a beautiful pace, looking and playing as good on an iPhone XS as it does on a PlayStation 4.

The story plays out as much more traditional than RPGs on mobile tend to do – quests are offered by NPCs, not menus. Exploration is done on foot (or glider) not via auto-run or dialogue box. Crafting involves finding items in your environment, including rare ones, not via lootbox or login reward. In fact, there is no “auto” navigation in this game at all – which shows a focus at Western players who tend to avoid titles that effectively play themselves. There are still login rewards, lootboxes and summoning heroes – but these are incorporated into the play, rather than simply fed to players.

Genshin’s gacha system is interesting in that it is restrained – summoned heroes and gear are still ranked by rarity and so forth, but their benefit is in their elemental powers. Enemy types and environmental hazards are manipulated by these powers and having a structured group of four appropriate types is imperative to success. The upgrade system is very restrained as are currency types. Easily one of the most impressive mobile games to date and one that certainly had me hooked from the start.

★★★★★