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Zenless Zone Zero review: painfully cool animation can’t save a superficial gachaZoning out
Zoning out
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Hoyoverse
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Hoyoverse
Zenless Zone Zero Official Release Teaser | The Person You Are Calling Is in a HollowWatch on YouTube
Zenless Zone Zero Official Release Teaser | The Person You Are Calling Is in a Hollow
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Hoyoverse
Unfortunately, most of your time is not really spent fighting. At least, not in the story mode of the early game. And even later, when more time becomes devoted to brawls, it turns out that too much “cool” can actually be pretty exhausting. When you put aside how good it looks, combat can basically be reduced to hammering the same four or five buttons in a cycle without a huge demand for strategy. There isn’t much depth to the fights, it is slick and superficial, and full of suave enemies that often move as swaggerfully as your own characters, yet don’t distinguish themselves from one another in any mechanically meaningful way. So what is the game, if it isn’t the fighting? To stealan old question, where does the game reside?
Well, much of it resides in going from menu to menu, clearing red exclams from the corners of tab headings. This is a kind of sweeping up process that involves clicking “claim” everywhere you can find it to hoover up various currencies with names my brain has simply rejected upon hearing. Some of the game resides in searching the internet or YouTube for explanations to the opaque systems that will let you modify this do-hickey, or bonusify that character. Still more resides in a rotating gameshow carousel of TV screens where the spoils of your gachapon lever-pulling are revealed. Spoon all that grease off the top and you’re left with a stylish but straightforward combat arena, entered on repeat, framed within a series of undemanding 2D mazes.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Hoyoverse
It doesn’t help that you’re fighting in what feels like the same few spaces over and over again. For all the stylishness of the world, there is remarkably little of it to explore. The most enjoyable environment is the city block where you do errands (more on that later). But as neat as the visual splendour of that zone is, it doesn’t make up for the boxy, uninteresting, and short-lived arenas in which you fight. It seems a pity that a game with such graceful character animations is confined to having the characters traverse the same few spaces of a de-constructed railway yard for hours.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Hoyoverse
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Hoyoverse
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Hoyoverse
When the term “juice” (or “game feel” as it’s more ofen called today) was casually coined, it was offered as a reminder to make games pleasing in the hands and eyes and ears of players, so that the player might become more present, more grounded, even in an unreal space. Zenless Zone Zero uses these same principles to encourage the player to live too often in a menu screen. To me it feels like a deeply superficial world. A really cool pair of shoes that sit around in your home, looking great yet going unused because they are uncomfortable and impractical to actually wear.
