The first beta test of Zenless Zone Zero has concluded on August 9. Being one of the highly anticipated projects created by HoYoverse, the game received a lot of positive review during the test, and we have also had a fair share of experience of this game with a unique art style and excellent combat, and unmeasurable potential.
As one of the leading company of the anime gacha mobile game market, HoYoverse has created a completely different and unique art style for Zenless Zone Zero than its Genshin Impact and Honkai series.
The game is set in a near future city, with a strong functional fashion style shown in the characters’ costume and equipment design, from Billy's industrial jacket and Cyber hacker mask to Ambi's mecha battle suit and high-frequency blade.
HoYoverse also spent a lot of effort on battle scene design, the details of the battle scenes such as the graffiti and old-fashioned tube TVs all reflect Zenless Zone Zero's Cassette Futurism aesthetic.
While pursuing retro sci-fi, HoYoverse maintains its usual high level of professionalism in designing cute female characters. The female characters that appeared in this test, Ambi and Nicole, has gained a lot of attention, and even trended on Chinese social media Weibo shortly.
In terms of combat, Zenless Zone Zero definitely got the most exciting combat experience among all the works of HoYoverse. During the combat, the players will have a smoothly control of all the characters, in addition to the basic moving mechanic, attack and dodge are the two core gameplay. Players can rely on these two systems alone to perform gorgeous combos and brilliant dodge counters, while still experiencing a very quality hit feedback. Whether it is a clean cut of the cold weapon or a gunshot sweep of the firearms, you can always feel the charm of each attack movement.
Zenless Zone Zero has also got the Genshin-style character switching and ultimate combos. In the battle, when the player continues to attack to accumalate balance bar below the enemy's health bar, it can trigger a link between different characters, and the player can choose to let the other two characters they teamed up with to perform a multi-combo.
However, there is no cool-down limit on the multi-combo attacks between characters, as long as the enemy is out of balance, players can perform the multi-combo that can also fill the enemy's balance bar again. This means that the player can chain their combos to keep the enemies out of balance, while inflicting tremendous damage.
Zenless Zone Zero's rougelike gameplay is quite classic, where players need to walk step by step through a map full of unknown darkness to get to the mission location, through random battles and senarios.
Personally I would hope the roguelike mechanics could be more innovative and has more flare to it, but the beautiful scenes, the wonderfully designed levels, and the vivid open world is too beautiful for me to criticize the game’s rather conservative progression design, let alone these can be very much be updated and expanded before the game’s launch date, and many years after that.
Although HoYoverse has not yet announced a specific release date for Zenless Zone Zero, we undoubtedly see a huge potential for this game in the early stages of beta testing, and this can very well be another juggernaut of a game HoYoverse has created.