Zenless Zone Zero review: HoYoverse’s hat-trick

Zenless Zone Zero’s smooth gameplay overflows with style

HoYoverse

Rhythmically smashing the buttons of my keyboard to a beat somewhere between EDM, jazz, and an orchestra performance, my team consisting of an elegant lycanthrope butler wearing jet-powered boots and bondage gear, a floating maid controlling two puppets from afar, and a maid with the tail of a shark wielding giant scissors dodges, parries, and counters the attacks of two otherworldly ballerinas with legs like those of Sam Jackson’s enforcer from the original Kingsman movie. 

It’s bloody ridiculous in the best of ways and the rapidly-paced combat of Zenless Zone Zero, the latest free-to-play gacha game by HoYoverse, flows along so nicely that you get completely absorbed by it. It feels like starring in an anime music video – and given that lead producer Zhenyu Li once upon a time spent his free time creating stuff like this on BiliBili (China’s equivalent to YouTube), that’s probably not a coincidence.

Distinctly colored indicators pop up to show when the perfect time to dodge or parry is and if I succeed in hitting that timing, everything but my character slows down for a second as they get out of harm’s way and initiate a counterattack. Alternatively, you can use these opportunities for an Assist, calling in one of your other characters to take the field – and especially in fights against large boss monsters, these rotations are a feast for the senses: You feel the impact of the truck-sized enemy’s attack as your character blocks it and is driven back a few meters by the sheer force, with sparks flying out from where the weapons clash and loud scraping sounds accompanying the animation as the ground is ripped open by the forces exerted on it from above.

Spectacular action is always just a single click away. / HoYoverse

As always, HoYoverse’s presentation is top notch – but the studio really outdid itself with Zenless Zone Zero. It’s not just that combat flows nicely on a mechanical level, the way it’s supported by visuals and sound really elevates the experience. It looks, feels, and sounds crisp when you hit or parry something, but – crucially – it never gets overwhelming. I love Acheron’s Ultimate from Honkai: Star Rail: It’s so over the top, so stylish, and feels so powerful, but the way it basically swallows up the screen would never fly in a real-time action RPG. You need to be able to know what’s going on at every moment, and the developers took great care to always deliver the vital information to players despite damage numbers floating around and spectacular animations emphasizing the impact of your attacks.

Those colored attack indicators are always clearly visible and there are also little arrows around your character to show the position of enemies currently not on the screen – these even light up to warn you of attacks, allowing you to react to moves coming from off-screen, which in turn lets you feel like a god of martial arts when you parry or dodge them.

As you attack enemies, you inflict Daze on them, which eventually leads to them getting stunned – and unleashing a Special Attack against them in this state allows your team to trigger a mighty Chain Attack with all of your characters rotating on the field one after the other to do their worst.

Designed for fast-paced action with simple controls, Zenless Zone Zero is meant to be an approachable genre entry. / HoYoverse

Everything you do in combat increases your Decibel Rating, but hitting combos, perfect dodges, and so forth brings in bonus points. Once the Decibel Rating has reached 3,000, you can trigger the Ultimate of your active character – as you can imagine, these attacks are powerful and are accompanied by top-notch animations putting the spotlight on the executing characters.

Like in Honkai: Star Rail, characters have a certain damage type and role, which defines what they’re best at and – combined with a set of passive skills – creates synergies between groups of units, which makes for a great team-building experience. Crucially, each character has a skill that can only be unlocked when they’re matched up with another unit of the same attribute or – and this is the cool thing – faction.

Each Agent in the game belongs to a certain group in the lore of Zenless Zone Zero. The units I described in the first paragraph, for example, are part of a faction called Victoria Housekeeping and the game wants to give players the freedom to go for themed compositions like this when they tackle any content, which is great. You can follow the meta and min-max things, but you’ll still get benefits if you’re more of a roleplayer. Every team of three is accompanied by a cute Bangboo – a sort of mascot and little helper with their own abilities and bonuses – which figures into your team-building considerations.

The Cunning Hares are the first group of Agents you'll partner up with. / HoYoverse

Zenless Zone Zero launches with 16 Agents belonging to five factions (growing to 17 and six respectively after the first three weeks) and will see regular updates, as you’re used to from HoYoverse. That certainly makes the roster feel a little restrictive still – Agents with the Ether Attribute, for example, will be a rarity for a while, similar to Imaginary Damage types in Honkai: Star Rail. However, thanks to the fighting game-like depth every Agent possesses in regards to their abilities and combo potential, that doesn’t really hurt the game. It’ll be a while before you master even the starting characters and compositions.

Of course, you can’t expect the complexity of a true fighting game from this title – Zenless Zone Zero is designed to be approachable for anyone and deliver satisfaction regardless of skill level. I’d put it a step below Wuthering Waves in terms of sheer mechanical intricacy, though it blows that game out of the water when it comes to how combat is presented and experienced. There is plenty of room to learn and improve your skills here to get that satisfying sense of making progress and getting better, but if you were expecting several mechanical layers, then this is not the title for you.

Combat is only one of the activities offered by HoYoverse’s latest game and is restricted to areas called Hollows – essentially little pocket dimensions popping up seemingly at random. You will dive into and explore these Hollows with the help of your Agents, but your actual protagonists are called Belle and Wise – and though you get to choose between one of them as your MC, the story really is about both of them. The siblings seemingly live a normal life running their video store in New Eridu, a city that has withstood the Hollow-induced apocalypse by harnessing the power of Ether, a rare resource that can be mined inside these dangerous dimensions.

That's Hollow Zero, the biggest Hollow found in New Eridu, from outside. / HoYoverse

However, they have a secret identity – on the gray side of the Inter-Knot, they are known as the legendary Proxy Phaethon. Proxies essentially are guides, who are specialized in leading those who pay for their services through the Hollows – and, as you can imagine, the authorities don’t take kindly to that kind of thing. As the player, you step into the shoes of Phaethon and manage both sides of their life.

And that’s one of the interesting aspects of Zenless Zone Zero: It’s not an epic tale of Archons and Aeons as presented in Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, where you’re marked out as the hero destined to save the world. You’re playing as a young adult trying to get by, helping the neighbors, and working some slightly shady side gigs from the backroom of your store. A lot of the story presented in the game is very slice-of-life-heavy and it’s a great change of pace. Of course, you do end up finding out about something larger going on in the world – and get mixed up in it – but this thread of the story is very well connected to Belle and Wise’s everyday life.

In that everyday life, you can explore limited areas such as Sixth Street – the neighborhood in which the siblings live – or the busy district of Lumina Square. In terms of size, these are nothing when compared to the sprawling areas in Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail, but they bustle with activity and personality. Cleverly, the developers have divided each day in the game into four phases – morning, afternoon, evening, and midnight – and depending on the time, the areas and the content found in them change, giving you reason to explore them several times.

Belle and Wise run a video store called Random Play. / HoYoverse

Over the course of the game, Belle and Wise establish personal relationships with the Agents they support as Proxy in the Hollows and you’ll be able to randomly encounter them as you wander the streets. Our shark maid from the start, Ellen, can be found wearing her school uniform and hanging out with her friends during the day, to name but one example. Interact with them in a positive way and their Trust in you will rise. This unlocks story missions and additional interactions – for example, you can send them a text and ask them to hang out at different places. It feels like a natural evolution of the message system in Honkai: Star Rail. It helps that all of the characters I’ve met so far are interesting or relatable in some way, so I want to spend time with and learn more about them.

This Trust mechanic is elegantly connected to several other systems in the game, such as your video store – you need to level it up to fulfill certain requests from Agents – and the roguelike endgame mode, Hollow Zero (the equivalent to Honkai: Star Rail’s Simulated Universe). As you increase the Trust characters have in you, the chance that special events featuring them will appear as you explore Hollow Zero gets higher as well.

Hollow Zero throws you into randomly generated dungeons you need to explore, picking up new power-ups between combat stages. Representing these dungeons throughout the entire game is a board of TV-shaped tiles on which you move around. 

You can invite Agents to activities after establishing initial Trust with them. / HoYoverse

Many beta testers didn’t enjoy this aspect of the game much, so it was heavily toned down – there is even talk of eliminating TV gameplay entirely in the future. Personally, I like the way the TV tiles represent dungeons, because it connects me to the main characters. Whenever you dive into a Hollow, your MC will see it through the eyes of a Bangboo called Eous that accompanies the Agents, while the other sibling observes what’s going on through monitors, similar to us when playing – so exploring the Hollows via the TV screens with their abstract representations of the environment feels incredibly thematic.

That said, I understand why people would feel less than enthusiastic about them. This gameplay feels like the opposite of the action-packed combat and the way it’s animated sometimes makes it feel like a drag even for me – despite the introduction of a feature to accelerate things. That problematic aspect of it is still present. Still, I think the creativity and inventiveness that went into designing the TV puzzles and mechanics deserves recognition – you’ll find yourself doing the most diverse things on this screen, from planning and executing a train robbery, to solving crimes by connecting evidence pieces, to exploring a haunted building and warding off enemies with flashlights, Luigi’s Mansion-style. 

I’ll out myself and hope that this aspect is not going to be phased out completely – it’s a nice change of pace and I think a lot of the criticism on it was a bit overblown in the first place.

These TV screens represent Zenless Zone Zero's dungeons, leaving much to the imagination. / HoYoverse

You’ll mostly find this TV gameplay in Hollow Zero and main story quests now – it’s been taken out of many side quests and even some of the later main story quests, which now offer a pure combat experience in connected 3D stages. In general, it feels like the team has really taken the feedback from the community to heart in the way it laid out the launch version’s content – there’s something for everyone and it’s all clearly marked out so everyone can find what they’re looking for.

You can even skip dialog and cutscenes in Zenless Zone Zero completely, if you’re really only there for the combat – the developers respect your time (which also goes for the quick dailies and equipment farm times) and give you the freedom to choose. Naturally, you’re missing out on tons of cool stuff if you do so. Aside from fully voiced dialog scenes, the game presents its story with a mix of fantastic animated cutscenes and neat comic book strips, which are also voiced. You can rewatch all of this stuff in the game through the video archive whenever you want, which is really nice.

Zenless Zone Zero’s animation style is quite different from other HoYoverse games – all of the characters feel way more expressive and all the movements feel a little exaggerated and bouncy across the board, giving it all a bit of a quirky charm. It also has the most varied and best NPC designs HoYoverse has ever done – not everyone you see is unique yet, but we’re slowly getting there.

Zenless Zone Zero contains some of the best animation work HoYoverse has done up to this point. / HoYoverse

Fitting the urban vibes, Zenless Zone Zero’s soundtrack is unique as well, combining genres as diverse as hip-hop, jazz, classical music, and EDM. As mentioned earlier, the OST blends into the combat especially well, giving the battles even more of a rhythmical feel.

On a technical level, the game feels buttery smooth and you can expect the usual HoYoverse polish. I encountered a single larger bug in the review build and some typos here and there, but not a single crash or anything that would have ruined my day.

Though producer Zhenyu Li told me in an interview that every project team at HoYoverse works in isolation from each other, Zenless Zone Zero starts out with many of the quality-of-life features Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail added post-launch based on fan feedback – it’s clear to me that there is a lot of institutional learning going on at the studio, benefiting all of its games.

Little Bangboo are a common sight in New Eridu: The adorable robots have become indispensable companions. / HoYoverse

Zenless Zone Zero is the best base game HoYoverse has released to date: It’s a step up from its predecessors in terms of presentation, tech, systems, and starting content – and since previous titles have all massively improved over the course of their strict and impressive update cycle, I feel confident that this is going to repeat for this one.

Combining charm and spectacle, mechanical satisfaction and approachability, rapid intensity, and immaculate cool vibes, Zenless Zone Zero is HoYoverse’s hat-trick.

Score: 9/10

Tested on: PC.