1.5/5 ★ – Jim_Howdy's review of Genshin Impact.

I never really thought I'd write this review but hey, I randomly won a thing and decided to try the game out. Ranking and writing about a gacha game should be different than most other games I've discussed, as their goals and overall design philosophy typically are vastly different to most games. Genshin however feels like it's slightly going for the typical pay to play game, but because of this it also has many shortcomings in my book. The usual goal of a gacha game is to get players to come back daily and do X amount of tasks to earn Y amount of rewards slowly building and progressing through a main task of some sort. For about 15-20ish days I was having some fun with it, but after that it was a slog and I basically just stopped. It's a very bold thing to say this early on, but I cannot see or understand how one would be addicted to this game and not hate it. For starters, the gameplay kinda blows. While the whole elemental system is somewhat interesting on the surface. Once you get down to it, it's really just ooga booga alternate element do damage. The combat basically just came down to mash attack, occasionally press the sprint button to dodge, and that was it, not many aspects to improve or get creative with. The structure of the open world was also a bit confusing. When presented with an open world I want to explore, but even that wasn't all that fun because there wasn't anything worthwhile to do. Getting to the story I don't have too much to say, as I didn't get too far. However, I felt it was incredibly boring at the start, it felt like there were unskippable filler cutscenes all over. I'm down for a story or game where "it gets better 50 hours in" but when it comes to a gacha game that's a lot different of a situation since there isn't a hook. The lack of a hook with the mediocre gameplay, exploration, and story all fail to encourage me to play the game daily. The only positives I can say are the most subjective things yet. Some of the character designs are actually pretty good and interesting, but with the gacha mechanics there is a 0% chance of getting said characters. The music was also oddly good? I was expecting a similarly mediocre/boring soundtrack but some of the songs were not quite memorable but really good in the moment. Overall with my time in the Genshin world, I didn't have a horrible time, but I sure as hell didn't have good one. I will give it props for generally being higher quality and offering quite a bit of content (no matter how boring) compared to a lot of other gacha games out there. If I paid for this I'd be pissed, but since it's f2p there was nothing to lose aside from my soul and time. If you're on the fence just go for it, see if it's for you and if not you'll never have to think about it again :)