Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact took the recipe of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – climbing cliffs, gliding through the air, solving puzzles with elements – and brought it to mobile as a living free-to-play service that has kept growing since its 2020 release. The player explores the vast world of Teyvat, divided into regions loosely inspired by real cultures, from European-flavored Mondstadt through Chinese Liyue to Japanese Inazuma, and each major update opens up another piece of the map as well as another chapter of the main story. On a touchscreen, controls rely on a virtual joystick and simple gestures for jumping, climbing, and gliding, but the game works just as well with a physical controller and is available across mobile, PC, and consoles with shared progress, so a player can start a journey on the subway and finish it at home on a big screen.

The combat system relies on a team of up to four characters, between whom the player switches on the fly, with each controlling one of seven elements whose combinations trigger elemental reactions – fire with wind burns wider, water with electricity strikes with lightning, ice turns into a slippery surface. This tactical layer, combined with a visual style somewhere between anime and Japanese RPGs, turned the studio miHoYo (today HoYoverse) into a global gaming powerhouse and Genshin into a title regularly compared to major console games rather than typical mobile entertainment, including fully voiced dialogue in several languages.

Behind all of this, however, stands a gacha economy: new characters and weapons are obtained through drawing with a currency called primogems, which can also be purchased, and the chance of pulling the most sought-after characters sits in the low single-digit percentages. The game can be completed for free as well, just with patience and without the newest faces, which makes it more of a long-term commitment than a quick pastime for a few evenings.

Why play it: For fans of open worlds and Japanese RPGs who can treat gacha monetization as an optional rather than mandatory part of the game.