Genshin Impact is quickly becoming one of my all-time most favorite games. It’s basically a cross between two of my favorite games, Breath of the Wild and Summoners War, and I am all for it. I first heard of the game earlier in the year because I was looking for upcoming Switch games that I should be looking out for.

Genshin Impact was one of the few I found that I thought was really cool and in all the videos I saw it was getting so much hype. Eventually I was invited to one of the betas around the start of July. I put a couple hours into the beta and I absolutely loved it, everything about the game was really cool and then the game finally came out at the end of September.

GRAPHICS: 10/10

The graphics are one of the strongest selling points of the game for a number of reasons. First of all, remember that you have to be connected to play. The fact that the game can run so smoothly while being online and displaying some epic graphics blew my mind. I had no issues with lag at all and during the first four hours, I had a one-second-long frame rate drop only five times.

The game itself looks really good. There’s so much color and a ton of details in all the characters and landscapes. The cut scenes are also really good, like something right out of an anime.

SOUND: 8/10

The sound is pretty good in Genshin Impact. I’m not too big of a fan of the generic game sounds but I really like the voice acting and the music. There was so much effort put into the voice acting. There are so many characters that have a ton of dialouge and the actual voices used work so well. There’s nothing generic about the voice acting at all. As for the music, there aren’t any songs that are iconic IMO but there were plenty of times where I felt the tunes were calm, relaxing, or catchy, and I really liked some of those moments.

ADDICTIVENESS: 10/10

For me, this aspect of the game is going to be broken down into two aspects, the gameplay and the mechanics. I’m not a big fan of the gameplay but I love the mechanics. For the gameplay, you run around the world fighting all sorts of enemies and doing a bunch of quests and other activities. The only problem I have with it is that there isn’t enough combat. IMO, all the enemies are really spread apart, especially near the beginning of the game. In one area, I might battle 3 monsters at once but then I’ll have to walk for like 15 seconds to get to the next area with monsters. It’s just not as fun.

The other aspect of addictiveness is what makes the game so strong for me, and is one of the reasons why I compare the game so much to Breath of the Wild and Summoners War. In Genshin Impact you get wishes that you use to summon characters that you can use in your party as well as weapons and other items. With each wish you can get a random weapon or a random character, including strong 5 star ones, which are a lot like Summoners War.

Anyone who likes these kinds of mechanics will love the game. You’ll love getting a collection of monsters, leveling them up, trying all sorts of different combinations of character-weapon-artifact-food. There’s just so much to do and you may never get bored.

STORY: N/A

Story is not something that I’m going to go into great depth or grade for a couple reasons. First of all, it’s like most RPG’s and open world games in the sense that there’s so much story and a ton of side quests. It will take you many hours just to get out of the prolouge. But at the same time, because the game is so new, I really don’t want to spoil parts of the game and I would rather let you explore it on your own.

DEPTH: 10/10

Genshin Impact has everything. The map is huge, it might even be as big as the Breath of the Wild map and has so much to do and so many places to explore. There’s also a large collection of characters, weapons, artifacts, books, and foods to collect and mess around with. Maybe you can beat the main portion of the game relatively quickly, but if you want to do literally everything, it may take you hundreds of hours.

Plus let’s not forget what this game is at its core, which means we’ll probably get a ton of added stuff later on like new characters and quests.

DIFFICULTY: 5/10

The game’s difficulty is right in the middle if you ask me. Early on battling all the monsters can be chalenging because you’ll need to hit each one like five to ten times to kill it. But then once you start levelling up, getting better weapons and characters, and mess around with things like artifacts, the game will become easier.

OVERALL: 9.5/10

Overall, this game is as close to perfect as it can get, and that’s saying a lot for a free game that is probably going to get lots of updates in the future. That’s right, you heard me, the game is freaking free. The only thing you would have to pay for is the in game currency which only gets you stuff that you can slowly get by playing, so you don’t have to pay at all if you don’t want to. The game is so much fun and it’s so fun to look at. For me, the game is definitley as good as the hype and I can’t wait to play more, especially once the game is released for the Switch. My overall grade for Genshin Impact is a 9.5 out of 10.