Genshin Impact

The Good
This has the look and feel of a big game. There is a lot of very good music and voice acting. It is bright, colourful and it plays easily. I have only played for five or six hours and I have not cleared the prologue yet but then I have been messing about and did not always take the fastest route. Even so I have acquired a companion, fought slimes, some weird creatures and a dragon, harvested and cooked food.

The Bad
I found the early stages of the game a little overwhelming
This is a new kind of game for me. There seems to be a great deal of on-line content which I am not used to. At one point, through the game, I had opened web links to the Daily Check In to collect my daily reward, the HoYoWiki for character descriptions, an interactive map, the community interest group where there are guides and fan art etc, HoYoVerse - the official Genshin Impact Community, and the Genshin Impact Progression Calculator. I opened so much because partly I did not want to miss out on any freebies and partly because I did not know what was important an what was not - and t.b.h. I still have no idea. There is a lot to take in and with some players posting cosplay photos it is plain it has a really big following.

I feel really old!
When setting up one of the accounts needed to play the game and access the on-line content I was asked for my year of birth. They only go back as far as "1983 and older"! Still, at least I am in the same grouping as my daughter :-)

My character's companion Paimon has the most irritating voice. Don't get me wrong here, the character's voice is clear, well acted, and perfectly suits the character and the game but it is like talking to a bossy, spoiled, whinging five year old brat and it really irritates me. When I next restart the game I will be looking for a way to mute her.

The game auto saves and restarts, so far, flawlessly but I have no control over it so I cannot save, try one thing, restart and try another.

There are conversation choices but I have seen nothing which tells me what effect my selection has on the game or my character. For example I met a new character, Amber, and she asked about Paimon my companion, the two possible responses were something like "She's my best friend" and "She's my emergency food source". I'm guessing some choices will increase the bond between the characters but I do not know if this is correct and, if so, just what the effect is.

The Bottom Line
The game is free, it plays well, it looks and sounds good. Not sure about the story is going, it seems very basic - one twin is taken by a goddess who puts a spell on the other who sleeps for a long time and then goes off to search for their sibling. It sounds like a cross between The Snow Queen and Sleeping Beauty, it makes for the basis of a very pretty game but it may not be meaty enough to hold my interest.

My current plan it to play it as a standard single player RPG, avoiding all the on-line community stuff apart from the daily rewards that is, and see how far I can go without paying anything and without getting bored.