BREATH OF THE WAIFU
PC Gamer US Edition|January 2021
GENSHIN IMPACT’s beautiful open world is a blast to explore.
Steven Messner
BREATH OF THE WAIFU

Really, I shouldn’t like Genshin Impact as much as I do. It has loot boxes with dreadfully low drop rates, an energy system that limits how quickly I progress, and an extremely annoying sidekick that refers to itself exclusively in third person. These flaws would doom other games, but Genshin Impact is also a fantastic RPG set in a vibrant open world that is so much more fun to explore than most full-priced games I’ve played this year.

If Genshin Impact has a secret weapon, it’s that it isn’t afraid to swipe features from other games, most notably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Just like Nintendo’s seminal hit, there’s an enormous world to explore that’s teeming with secrets, puzzles and cleverly hidden loot. There are mercifully few icons on the map, so a lot of the exploration is self-guided. I have to climb mountains, glide across canyons, and pay attention to my surroundings if I hope to discover it all. It might offend hardcore Nintendo fans, but Genshin Impact doesn’t just thoughtlessly copy and paste these ideas. It expands on and tweaks them to fit really nicely into a loot-obsessed RPG that is—despite what its roots in mobile games might imply—incredibly fun to play.

WHOLE NEW WORLD

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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
PC Gamer US Edition

Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.

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