Genshin Impact

I've progressed a decent bit into the game so I guess it's time for a review since it's not going to end anytime soon:

Combat: (8/10)

Combat system is very simple to learn but a bit difficult to master. There are normal and charged attacks. No dedicated button to dodge but you can jump or sprint from attacks. Parry and shield are only available for certain characters. There are elemental bursts (E and Q in pc) - powerups with cooldowns. And there are elemental reactions which you can use to your advantage (e.g use freeze/cryo near water to freeze enemies, affect them with fire and then use anemo/wind to produce the reaction 'swirl'). Upto midgame in both open world and quests, combat is nothing difficult and you can easily win most battles if you level up your characters and put some effort into building them with proper artifacts.

Open World Aspect: (8/10)

The world is huge, and it has small encounters, treasures, puzzles and challenges, but despite that it feels empty sometimes. The character moves very slowly, there's no mount so it gets a bit tedious. Gliding is only possible if you jump for a higher place.

The combat being fairly simple and there being too many encounters, the game gets a bit repetitive sometimes. But some of the puzzles are really good - for eg, the three mountain puzzles near Mt Aocang is really good.

Quests: (9/10)

The main quests are extremely good. Side quests have a lot of fetch quests and they might get boring. Commissions are okay, though they are mostly 'fight hillichurl' types. There are random events and world quests too if you start exploring the world which is fun.

Characters and Interactions: (5/10)

This is probably the worst part of the game for me. The dialogues are terrible and repetitive. Voice acting is okay for the chinese version. But I don't get why Paimon keeps repeating the same words? Is that supposed to be cute? It's annoying. And her English voice is downright garbage.

Most of the time I don't really care about what the characters are saying because of this repetition. I enjoy getting the characters and using them in combat though.

Music: (10/10)

The best part of the game. I love how the exploration theme and battle themes mix together. It's extremely good. Stormterror Lair is one of the most beautiful ost I've heard.

Graphics is okay as it is to be expected in this kind of game. Co-op is fun. Gacha aspect is annoying, but can't complain when it's a gacha game to begin with. Overall, it's a good game if you can tolerate annoying dialogues. Solid 8/10 game from me.