Every gacha that has launched since 2020 has been measured against this one, and most of them lose. That is the strange position Genshin Impact sits in now: the game that created the open-world gacha, watched a wave of successors chase it, and still does the single hardest thing, building a world worth living in, better than any of them. Our score is an 8.6. It is not the highest we give a gacha, because the combat and the economy have aged in ways its own children have improved on. But as a place to spend a few hundred hours, nothing in the genre is richer.
If you are new and just want the fast track: roll a starter you like, learn the elemental reaction system, and grab the current codes for free Primogems before your first ten-pull.
What half a decade actually built
Teyvat is now six full nations deep, each one a self-contained country with its own architecture, folklore, cuisine, music, and cast, and the seventh, Snezhnaya, arrives in Version 7.0 on August 12 as the finale players have waited on since launch. That scale is the headline. You can drop into Fontaine's underwater cities or Natlan's volcanic tribes and find dozens of hours of hand-built quests, puzzles, and world-building that most studios would sell as a full-price expansion. Genshin gives it away and keeps doing it every six weeks.
The combat is elemental chess. Seven elements react with each other, Vaporize, Overload, Freeze, Bloom, and the rest, and team building is about chaining those reactions rather than stacking raw numbers. It is genuinely deep, and our team-building guide and best-characters breakdown exist because the ceiling is high. The catch is pace: encounters are shorter and less mechanically busy than what Wuthering Waves or Zenless Zone Zero now offer, and if you come to Genshin from those, its fights can feel a step slow.
The world is still the whole point
Here is the thing nobody has out-built: exploration that rewards curiosity. Genshin's map is stuffed with hidden mechanics, environmental puzzles, and little authored moments, and the traversal, climbing, gliding, and each region's movement gimmick, makes wandering a pleasure rather than a chore. Pair that with a HOYO-MiX soundtrack that runs from orchestral suites to fully localized regional themes, and Genshin becomes a game you leave running just to be inside.
Where the shine has worn off
Two flaws keep this out of the top tier. The first is the economy. Genshin's Primogem income is the tightest of the major gacha, and its 90-pull hard pity with a 50/50 on the featured five-star means a free-to-play player pulls slowly and picks carefully. Run the numbers on any banner with the pull planner before you commit, and see exactly how it ranks on cost and pay-to-win against its peers.
The second is the endgame. For a game this enormous, the recurring combat content is surprisingly light: the Spiral Abyss and the newer Imaginarium Theater are good, but they are most of what "endgame" means, and neither scratches the itch the way a deeper post-story loop would. Late-region exploration can also tip from delight into checklist, especially once the novelty of a new nation fades. This is a game you play for the journey far more than the grind at the end of it.
Should you start in 2026?
Yes, and the timing is unusually good. The story arc is about to close its seven-nation saga with Snezhnaya, so a new account has a clean, enormous runway of content to work through, and years of it are permanently available rather than time-gated. If you specifically want the fastest, flashiest action combat, its successors do that better by design. If you want the deepest world, the best soundtrack, and the most content per dollar in the genre, Genshin is still the one everything else is trying to be.
The bottom line
Genshin Impact is a landmark that has been quietly lapped on a couple of mechanics and comfortably holds its lead on the ones that matter most. The combat is dated and the economy is stingy, but the world, the music, and the sheer volume of free content make it an easy recommendation and a genuinely special place to spend time. 8.6 out of 10, and still the benchmark.
Starting fresh? Keep the Genshin wiki and tier list open as you build, and redeem the latest codes before you pull.
