Honkai: Star Rail launched earlier this week and it's arguably HoYoverse's biggest release since Genshin Impact. This latest Honkai entry, with each game in the series telling mostly separate stories, has been sailing up the top games lists as it has racked up 20 million downloads and counting. It seems HoYoverse has another major hit on its hands, although it is still early days, while players have been busy discussing the game's merits.
Honkai: Star Rail is a free-to-play RPG that features HoYoverse's distinctive anime art style that Genshin Impact fans will immediately recognise. Its setting however is not so much fantasy lands, but the sci-fi space of, er, space. But that's not the only difference from the game that catapulted HoYoverse to worldwide attention. Honkai: Star Rail's gameplay differs in that it is more like a traditional RPG since it features turn-based combat rather than the more action-orientated Genshin.
Over on the HonkaiStarRail subreddit players have been gathering to discuss and debate this turn-based gameplay. In a thread titled, "Anybody else actually prefer that this game is turn-based?" the OP notes some of the criticism Star Rail has drawn owes it's style of gameplay, which might be considered off-putting to more casual players. "I just think that some people are experiencing turn-based RPG for the first time, sometimes being too harsh, not realising that this type of combat mechanic has already been popular in history, even way before digital games (i.e., chess, chinese checkers, etc)," they write.
Anybody else actually prefer that this game is turn-based?
by u/glidingtea in HonkaiStarRail
"There's a massive niche of gamers that absolutely loves turn-based games", they continued. This is certainly true and RPGs have been known for it, especially those that have come out of Japan, with the likes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest the most obvious exponents, even if the more recent entries in these respective series are not as strictly turn-based as they once were. But let's not forget that a series as popular as Pokemon also rides on turn-based gameplay.
For some others, turn-based seemed better for a particular platform. "Genshin is not a game best played on mobile," wrote one commentor. "I started the game on my phone, but I had to move to PC in order to even complete some of the more difficult puzzles and combat situations", they said, before referring to Star Rail as the far better mobile game experience.
Certainly, not everyone agreed, with one commentor simply saying that they prefer action, and getting more than 200 upvotes at the time of writing. But the overall thread drew a lot of discussion and debate as comments stacked in multiple hundreds. But as one commentor sagely noted, criticism of turn-based combat/mechanics is nothing new.