Honkai: Star Rail’s 2.0 patch is a massive step forward for players who can access it

Honkai: Star Rail’s 2.0 replace kinds one other glittering jewel in Hoyoverse’s already illustrious crown of achievements. The brand new patch takes the already spectacular base recreation — which pairs beautiful animation with zippy turn-based fight — and kicks every thing up a degree. It introduces Penacony, a area that pairs an intriguing story of a dream world set on a former penal colony with an artistically formidable world design that’s like a golden fever dream of a spot, in some way capturing the sensation of a theme park and on line casino rolled up in a single. Even smaller particulars, just like the replace’s minigames, present a degree of polish and consideration not seen in earlier Honkai: Star Rail variations or in Genshin Impression. The patch represents the end result of years of Hoyoverse’s expertise in recreation improvement, however there’s one drawback: You’ll need to play a ton of quests to get to it.

Honkai: Star Rail is a free-to-play gacha recreation that follows a bunch of explorers known as the Anonymous who journey from planet to planet. Prior adventures have despatched its protagonist, the Trailblazer, to desolate snowy worlds and to spaceships the dimensions of total cities. Now, with Penacony, you’ll be capable of discover a complete metropolis that you just go to by going to sleep and connecting to it by means of your character’s goals, Matrix-style. Total, this dreamscape has the look of a gaudy, packed metropolis that marries futuristic aesthetics with a type of Twenties retro vibe. Its streets tower with big, bulb-lit billboards and bustle with automated, floating transportation that appears impressed by a brass horn. Stroll down its mall and also you’ll be handled to sights like human-sized champagne glasses and a ceiling lined with glowing celestial frescoes, and treats like floating ice cream and self-playing musical devices.

The world seems to comprise nods to Disney. Penacony’s mascot is an anthropomorphized clock that appears prefer it’s from a Fleischer animation and has a voice that’s eerily much like the nasally tone of Mickey Mouse. What’s extra, the creator of this world, a person often known as the Clockmaker, is well known as an individual who was in a position to deliver creativeness to life — a price echoed in numerous Disney sights and advertising and marketing.

Picture: Hoyoverse by way of gamerjive

Penacony’s general setting appears like in the event you mixed a decadent celebration from The Nice Gatsby with a on line casino, however then reimagined all of that as an anime recreation with sci-fi parts sprinkled in. After you have that, infuse that total idea with the identical feeling that you just get whereas strolling by means of a Disney theme park and you’ve got Penacony. Weirdly sufficient, all these parts come collectively in a method that makes it really feel surreal, slightly than overwhelming.

When you dive into this world, what you study it makes every thing even weirder. Earlier than it grew to become a go-to interstellar vacationer vacation spot, Penacony truly was once a large jail. So we mainly get a situation of this good however ominous dreamland that’s hiding its darker undercurrents. From the get-go, this units us up to consider what’s being hidden on this seemingly good world, and units up the story for a scrumptious sense of stress the place we’re cautiously exploring a prison-turned-Disney World-type place.

Fairly than feeling like methods to waste time and maximize how lengthy folks play the sport, every minigame feels thoughtfully crafted. There’s a lovely isometric puzzle recreation the place you prepare blocks to create a path for a toy to stroll. There’s a noir minigame the place you discover as a tiny detective. Exploration puzzles, the place you possibly can alter the surroundings by zooming out and taking a top-down view of the town and your character, work and don’t burden gamers with overly sophisticated guidelines. Moments like these actually make 2.0 really feel like the very best model of Star Rail we’ve got gotten but, and spotlight the refinement of concepts from Genshin Impression. I bear in mind fiddling for hours with finicky perspective puzzles from Genshin Impression’s 2.8 Golden Archipelago occasion.

Picture: Hoyoverse by way of gamerjive

Developer Hoyoverse has hit its stride with Penacony and flexed a recreation that far exceeds my expectations. On this sense, Honkai: Star Rail’s 2.0 replace represents a key turning level for the sport towards the higher. Nevertheless, it’s been a couple of 12 months because the 1.0 recreation got here out, and a couple of.0 marks a time the place the sport hits a difficulty that so many live-service video games do. The actually nice bits come only a bit too late within the story.

In case you’re a brand new participant, going to Penacony will probably be locked behind the mainline quests for 2 total worlds that we explored within the 1.0 patches. It’s exhausting to say simply how lengthy reaching this level will take in the event you beeline it, however you positively received’t be wrapped up in a matter of hours. It’s simply too lengthy of a time dedication to suggest to people who aren’t already within the recreation. Whereas some dwelling video games have launched quality-of-life options to assist gamers get to the very best content material, the Honkai: Star Rail builders haven’t introduced something alongside these strains at this level. All in all, I’ve been extremely impressed with this newest iteration of Honkai: Star Rail, but it surely’s an enormous bummer that it comes after every thing else.