I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that gotcha games are one of the most lucrative money-making schemes in the entire video game industry. The trend has been kicking around in the background for over a decade, but recently the king of gotcha hill has undoubtedly been the Chinese juggernaut Hoyoverse. Between Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail these lads are absolutely rolling in dough and not wanting to pass up an opportunity to make even more dough they’ve created a third game known as Zenless Zone Zero. Though it hasn’t been out for long, ZZZ has been another smash hit for the gotcha giant so let’s dive in and see what all the fuss is about.

Zenless Zone Zero takes place in the city of New Eridu, a cyberpunk metropolis plagued by distortions in space and time called hollows which are full of monsters. The player takes the role of proxy, freelance hackers who illegally guide people through the hollows on missions law-abiding guides can’t accept. I would go into further detail on the game’s main story, but a good portion of the game’s chapters feel pretty disconnected from one another and even the parts with some level continuity often leave you with more questions than answers by the end. I can understand the developers wanting to leave a few plot threads hanging so that players are enticed to come back for more every time new content is added, but Zenless Zone Zero is so cryptic that I can’t really offer any meaningful discussion of its central narrative.

If anything the most compelling story content can be found in the character episodes. These side stories highlight the game’s playable characters by putting them into scenarios that challenge them in interesting ways or reveal parts of their backstories and personalities you won’t get in the main quest. Heck one of the character episodes almost had me in tears, but that’s mostly because the subject matter hit me in a pretty personal place. Overall however, ZZZ has a long way to go before I can truly compliment or condemn the quality of its writing.

Despite my indifference to the game’s story in its current state, the game’s visual presentation ultimately went a long way in keeping my attention. Hoyoverse is filthy rich thanks to the successes of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail and that development budget is on full display in Zenless Zone Zero. Characters have expressive, fluid animations and the city of New Eridu is a vibrant world. The only downside to all this visual spectacle is if you’re playing the game on a low end PC, like me, expect long load times and some slowdown during large set pieces.

The game’s sound design is serviceable, but nothing special. The voice acting has a few good performances here and there, but the large majority of the cast is about average in terms of English dubs. The sound effects do a good job selling the power behind big attacks during combat, though if things got a little too chaotic on screen the sound effects would sometimes cut out all together. This might be another symptom of playing on my potato of a PC, but I digress. The lowest point in the sound design however, is definitely the music. It fits the setting well enough, but even if I could hear the music over the chaos of combat there’s very few songs I would describe as particularly memorable.

The core of ZZZ’s gameplay is the combat which is very reminiscent of games like Devil May Cry or Hi-Fi Rush. The player fights through waves of enemies using a team of three agents which they can swap between at any time. Each agent has a fairly limited set of combo strings and special moves with different strengths and weaknesses so switching between agents between attacks is vital to maintaining a high damage output. Agents also gain buffs from being on the same time with agents who share the same faction or damage type which makes team composition very intuitive, though it does artificially limit more experimental agent groupings. There’s plenty of small mechanical nuances within each character that rewards mastery, but even if you’re just playing by feel it’s still a fun action game.

During missions, combat is usually broken up by hollow exploration on a map composed of CRT monitors arranged in a grid. It might seem like an odd set up at first, but remember that the player is not an agent on the frontlines, but a computer hacker guiding agents through an unstable dimension. During these segments there are plenty of puzzles to solve and rewards to find, but in most story missions the puzzles are so obviously telegraphed that they’ll rarely offer any sort of challenge. While this exploration grid might be thematically appropriate for a computer hacker, the lack of depth ultimately makes these sections more time consuming than anything else.

Outside of missions the player inhabits a fragmented overworld where they can talk to NPCs to receive side missions, shops to buy items, and access various side modes that reward materials needed for upgrading characters. Much like the TV exploration sections of missions, the overworld sometimes feels like a bit of an unnecessary barrier between the player and whatever they’re trying to do. However, there is the option to directly teleport to most of the important locations so it’s not quite as annoying.

The worst part of the game however, is obtaining and upgrading the playable agents. Brace yourselves because we’ve got a big rant incoming. Agents are unlocked by acquiring tapes and redeeming them for a random reward. The vast majority of these rewards are subpar items not really worth investing in and the stuff you’ll actually want, namely the agents, is extremely rare since the reward is always randomized. To put it simply, it’s a gambling system designed to frustrate you and get you to spend money on microtransactions to bypass the tedium and disappointment that comes from grinding out tapes only to be screwed over by a bad roll of the dice.

Once you’ve got a few characters you’ll need to upgrade them in order to keep pace with ZZZ’s more challenging content. Agents have experience levels, abilities, and skills which all need their own unique resources to upgrade from side content like the VR challenges. Furthermore there are W-Engines and 6 Drive Disks which function as your equipment which are acquired through the same gambling system as characters and dropped by enemies in a side mode respectively. All of these different required resources and randomized equipment make it borderline impossible to optimize your agents in a timely manner and the fact you need to do this for at least six agents to truly get into the endgame experience certainly does not help.

To top off this madness, the player is only allowed to replay these material grinding side modes a limited amount of time per day which can only be circumvented by, you guessed it, more microtransactions. Zenless Zone Zero may advertise itself as a free to play game, but it’s designed in such a way to frustrate you into spending money to bypass the infuriatingly slow progression, so we might as well call it out for what it truly is: a predatory game. Being a college graduate who paid off his student loans I’d say I’m pretty thrifty with my money, but even I fell for this model and paid out a few pesos to push my materials over the finish line for an agent I wanted to use. At this point it probably doesn’t even need to be said out loud, but if you have terrible self control with money do not play Zenless Zone Zero.

For the Catholic perspective, let’s take a step back from the obvious pitfalls of predatory microtransactions and readdress the premise of the game’s story. As a Proxy the player is technically operating outside of the law, however the game makes it pretty clear from the start that you’re something of a white hat criminal who is willing to sacrifice personal gain if it means solving a problem and getting everyone out alive. Heck, there are even chapters of the game where the player assists the police at the risk of being discovered as a proxy purely out of the goodness of his/her heart. Now I’m certainly not going to criticize the game for having such an upstanding protagonist, but it renders the whole “rogue hacker” angle of the game’s premise kinda pointless. If ZZZ wants to have a strong moral component, they should lean into the protagonist’s existing spirit of charity and move away from being a criminal enterprise. Heck, I would go so far as to say the story would improve if the protagonists became more criminal so long as such actions have meaningful consequences. Anything would be better than this lukewarm middle ground.

Zenless Zone Zero is a game with great combat and visual spectacle, but the drawn-out progression system wrapped inside of a predatory business model made the experience far more exhausting than it needed to be. I started having a lot more fun with the game after taking a break, advancing through new story content and grinding materials at my own pace. ZZZ is free to download so if it interests you in any way there’s no shame in giving it a try, but it’s definitely a game I would recommend with tempered expectations.

Scoring: 72%

Gameplay: 4/5

Visuals: 5/5

Sound: 3/5

Story: 2/5

Replayability: 4/5

Morality/Parental Warnings

Microtransactions: Zenless Zone Zero is designed to frustrate players into pulling out their wallets in order to speed up progression through the game.

Violence: Combat is the most involved aspect of the game with swords, guns, and elemental-themed super powers used to fight monsters, machines, and human opponents. Blood and gore is absent.

Sexual Content: Some characters wear revealing and/or sexualized outfits. Many female characters have large chests that bounce when fighting or making elaborate gestures.

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