Genshin Impact
Year: 2020
Rating: T
Time Played: 350+ hours
Having played many free-to-play games, there’s usually a point where you run out of stuff to do and the game ceases to be fun. Usually, this is when the time-based resources run out and you have to wait to keep playing the game. It surprised me how many hours I put into the free-to-play action-adventure game, Genshin Impact before I hit this wall. Even when I reached this point, I still had plenty of diverse activities to do to keep me occupied for hours at a time. With regular story updates, it’s almost overwhelming how much you can get out of this game without paying anything.
Part of Genshin Impact’s appeal is its somewhat Breath of the Wild-like open world and visual style. While it leans a bit more on anime influences for its character designs (of which there are plenty of characters to play as in this game), Genshin Impact‘s world might be even larger than the huge version of Hyrule that appears in Breath of the Wild. There are settings from traditional fantasy to Chinese- and Japanese-inspired realms to geographic locations like a towering icy mountain and dark mine. And while both games have limited basic enemy types, Genshin Impact is always adding new bosses to challenge your skills.
One reason I picked up Genshin Impact was that I could play it on my phone. Synching progress between my brief sessions out and about and the times I’d sit down to play at my computer was nice, but because this game is so incredibly massive, it’s now too big to play on my phone without me having to delete all the other apps on it. Consequently, I now play it less than I used to, even if I have even more story content to unlock now. Still, I enjoy playing this game occasionally and welcome all the free updates it gets every few weeks.
An enormous free-to-play game that evokes Breath of the Wild, I give Genshin Impact 4.0 stars out of 5.
