Zenless Zone Zero Review: The Best Combat in Gacha, If the Endgame Doesn't Wear You Down

There's a rhythm ZZZ teaches you that almost no other gacha bothers to. An enemy winds up a heavy attack, the screen flashes, and if your timing is right you don't just dodge — you slow time, snap back with a perfect dodge-counter, and hand off to a teammate who crashes in with a Chain Attack that fills the screen. Land three of those in a row and you feel like you're playing a character-action game that happens to have a login screen. That combat is the reason Zenless Zone Zero matters, and two years after launch it's still the best in its class.

Zenless Zone Zero launched in mid-2024 and is now deep into its version 3.x era, with updates like 3.1 and the incoming 3.2 arriving on HoYoverse's reliable roughly-six-week cadence. We put in serious hours across the current patch to see whether the whole package has grown into the combat, or been left behind by it.

The combat is the headline, and it earns it

Most gacha "action" games are auto-battlers with a manual button. ZZZ is the opposite: it's a genuine real-time action game built around three pillars — dodging, parrying and swapping. You control a team of three Agents, and the magic is in the switch. A perfect assist lets you tag out the moment an enemy strikes, canceling their attack and setting up a devastating counter from the incoming character. String those handoffs together and combat becomes a fluid dance of three fighters sharing one health bar of momentum.

It looks incredible doing it. New Eridu, the game's post-apocalyptic city, is one of the most stylish settings HoYoverse has ever built — a neon-soaked, comic-book world with animation quality that routinely outclasses games costing sixty dollars. Every Agent has a distinct kit and a distinct silhouette, and the audio design punches with every hit.

The 2026 meta has shifted, and not everyone loves where it went. The endgame now heavily rewards rapid daze application — stunning enemies to open damage windows — over raw burst, and newer Agents pile on mechanics like stance-dancing and delayed counters. It keeps the ceiling high for skilled players, but it also means some older favorites feel benched by the math.

HoYoverse actually listened, and it shows

ZZZ's origin story includes a famous misstep. At launch, the game funneled you through a "TV mode" — a top-down, node-by-node board you navigated between fights. Players found it slow, over-used and a constant interruption to the combat that was supposed to be the draw. Rather than dig in, HoYoverse gutted it: by version 1.2 the TV mode was pulled from the main narrative and replaced with direct, run-around exploration, plus auto-explore tools to sweep up rewards you missed.

That responsiveness has defined the game since. The onboarding is genuinely beginner-friendly, the story is delivered with proper voice acting and comic-panel cutscenes, and quality-of-life features have accumulated steadily. It's a game that has visibly gotten better at listening — a rarer trait in live service than it should be.

Where the second year wobbles

Honesty time. ZZZ's steady improvement hasn't been a straight line, and the second year exposed some cracks. The endgame difficulty is the biggest one: the spikes are erratic, and modes like the rotating combat challenges can lurch from trivial to a hard damage-check wall depending on whether you own the flavor-of-the-patch Agent. When the meta prizes a specific mechanic, roster gaps stop being cosmetic and start being a paywall on content.

Not every experiment paid off, either. Some of the 2026 additions landed with a shrug, and a few story threads that were teased early never fully delivered on their promise. The narrative is good — better than the genre average — but it's not the untouchable pillar the combat is.

And it remains, unavoidably, a gacha. It's genuinely generous by the standards of the category, with reasonable pity systems and a steady drip of free premium currency, but the strongest Agents and their signature gear live behind randomized banners. You can clear all the story content free. Competing at the top of the endgame is a different, pricier conversation.

Who it's actually for

If you bounce off gacha games because the "combat" is just watching numbers, ZZZ is the one to try — it's a real action game first and a collection game second. If you want deep open-world exploration or a sprawling narrative, it's more focused and arcade-shaped than something like Genshin. It's for players who want to play their fights, master a team's switch timings, and log in for a sharp 20-minute session that respects their hands more than their wallet.

Verdict

Zenless Zone Zero has the best real-time combat in the gacha space, full stop, and a presentation that makes most of its peers look cheap. Its second year proved HoYoverse will listen and iterate — and also that the endgame balance and gacha economy can still sour the experience if you chase the meta. Treat it as an action game you dip into, not a treadmill you owe hours to, and it's one of the easiest gacha recommendations on Windows.

Rating: 8.5 / 10 — Elite combat and style, held just short of greatness by an uneven endgame.