The Zenless Zone Zero beta, or rather its first tuning test, is underway, giving us some early hands-on impressions and gameplay for the next title from Genshin Impact dev Hoyoverse. Unsurprisingly, players have immediately latched onto its fast combat and roguelike progression – and its jiggle physics. Also that.
This tuning test is essentially a closed beta which only saw a limited number of invites, but participants – including plenty of Genshin Impact content creators – can at least stream and share their gameplay. This has already produced a wealth of clips, showcases, and highlight reels, and the test has only just begun at the time of writing.
It's immediately clear that Zenless Zone Zero is a much faster action game than Genshin Impact, and maybe even Hoyoverse's Honkai Impact 3rd. You can seemingly assemble a squad of three characters and swap between them on the fly, either to use specific moves or to chain fighting game-style assists to charge your ultimate abilities. You can also perfect-dodge attacks to briefly slow time, and abilities seem to have short cooldowns in general, giving fights positively breakneck pacing overall.
- Zenless Zone Zero is still aggressively horny, but basically everything else has changed and now it's a much better action RPG with some legit roguelike sauce
- Phantom Blade Zero is a "kung fu punk" action RPG that wants to follow in the footsteps of Black Myth Wukong: "there's a lot of pressure on us, but I think in a good way"
YouTuber Veyn Genshin shared a nice bit of gameplay for three characters – Von Lycaon, Miyabi, and Nicole – which shows the general flow of the game. The Game Club has a good collection of each character's abilities and talents, and Arekkz Gaming prepared a supercut of every character's ultimate abilities. If you want to see more of a specific character, check out this massive solo gameplay showcase from UngUng Gaming.
…and if you're looking to compare Zenless Zone Zero's jiggle physics to Genshin Impact, you're in good company; such posts have quickly risen to the top of the game's official subreddit and spread to its Discord. Hoyoverse has, uh, noticeably dialed things up compared to Genshin – which is genuinely pretty tame compared to a lot of gacha games – and to the surprise of no one ZZZ's Nicole has become the case study for this and quickly gone semi-viral in multiple regions.
ｴｯｯｯｯｯｯここだけで一生遊べる pic.twitter.com/g9wmcMnNOaAugust 5, 2022
Hoyoverse has another new game in the works on top of Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero.
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