HoYoverse has another Genshin-level hit on its hands with Zenless Zone Zero, if this dystopian urban fantasy can find itself a suitably nostalgic audience - hands-on preview

I’ve made the mistake of underestimating HoYoverse games before. When Honkai: Star Rail launched last year, I approached it very much with the assumption that Genshin Impact had been lightning in a bottle — a one-off banger that I was happy to make the sole exception to the rule that I had no interest in F2P RPGs aimed at a mobile-first market — and that I’d cover HSR for a few weeks around launch and then quietly drop off once the initial surge of interest died down. More fool me, then, when it ended up becoming one of my favourite games of 2023, with around 200 hours on my account to date.

I should’ve gone into Zenless Zone Zero with my expectations set pretty high. But, I’d also heard rumblings that ZZZ wasn’t up to par with HoYo’s other recent output. As a result, my expectations going in were… complicated: I was willing to be convinced, but not expecting the world.

Even if you’re familiar to HoYoverse games, Zenless Zone Zero has a few surprises up its sleeve for you. Dropped into the preview build with no prior hands-on experience, I found that untold hours spent playing both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail hadn’t prepared me to hit the ground running in Zenless Zone Zero quite as effortlessly as I’d assumed. Knowledge of HoYo’s other games came in handy when navigating menus and calculating gacha exchange rates, for instance, but actually interacting with its world is quite a different experience.