Zenless Zone Zero Review: Is It Still Worth Starting in 2026?

Every live-service game hits a point where the question stops being "is this good?" and becomes "is this good to start now?" Zenless Zone Zero has been out long enough to answer that properly. HoYoverse's urban action-RPG launched to a mixed reception — sharp combat wrapped around a padded, slow-burn story and a TV-investigation mode nobody asked for. Two years and a long run of version updates later, the rough edges have been sanded down enough that it's worth a real, current answer: yes, and here's why.

The combat is still the reason to play

Zenless Zone Zero's core loop — fast dodges, Chain Attacks, and stylish team-swap combos in New Eridu's Hollows — remains the best argument for the game on its own merits. Where a lot of gacha action games hide mediocre combat behind flashy ultimates, ZZZ's fights hold up on pure mechanical feel: parry timing matters, positioning matters, and a well-piloted budget team can out-clear a whale playing on autopilot. That's not a small thing in a genre where roster size usually decides outcomes.

The Agent roster itself has matured a lot since launch. Miyabi, Astra Yao, and the newer additions like Claret Flint and Sigrid de L'Azur give the current meta real breadth across Anomaly, Attack, and Support archetypes, and — unlike some contemporaries — investment in one strong Agent tends to carry across multiple team comps rather than locking you into a single "meta shell." If you already skimmed our tier list breakdown, you know the gap between S and A tier here is narrower than most gacha games bother to make it.

Hollow Zero and Shiyu Defense carry the endgame

The two systems doing the heaviest lifting for long-term engagement are Hollow Zero (a roguelite-adjacent Hollow-diving mode with its own buff economy) and Shiyu Defense (the recurring combat-rating gauntlet). Both give you a reason to log in beyond "the story updated," and both are designed with enough forgiveness — Hollow Zero's buffs in particular — that undergeared or F2P rosters aren't locked out of clearing content, just out of the very top of the leaderboard.

That's the throughline of ZZZ's whole design philosophy at this point in its life: a small, well-built roster clears real content. You don't need every S-Rank release to stay competitive with yourself, which matters a lot if you're weighing whether a two-year-old gacha game is going to demand two years of catch-up spending to enjoy.

Where it still falls short

The story's early chapters are still its weakest stretch — pacing that front-loads exposition and TV-mode investigation segments before the combat and character writing get room to breathe. HoYoverse has visibly worked on this in later chapters (tighter delivery, less filler), but a new player has to get through the slow opening to reach the good part, and that's a real barrier that reviews shouldn't paper over.

The other honest caveat is the one every gacha review owes its readers: the ceiling on team-building depth is still gated by pulls, Mindscape copies, and W-Engine banners. The base game is generous with its systems, but wanting to build more than one or two complete teams eventually runs into the same spending question every game in this genre asks. Nothing here is predatory by genre standards — HoYoverse's rates and pity systems are industry-standard-transparent — but it's not free of the mechanic either.

Who should start Zenless Zone Zero now

If you bounced off ZZZ at launch because of the TV-mode pacing, or skipped it entirely waiting to see if it would stick around: this is a good entry point. New-player catch-up mechanics (selectable free Agents, accelerated early banners, a deep backlog of story content to burn through at your own pace) mean you're not walking into a content deficit the way you would with some two-year-old live-service titles. If snappy, parry-based combat with real skill expression is what you're after — more than roster-collecting for its own sake — ZZZ delivers that better in late 2026 than it did at launch.

Conclusion

Zenless Zone Zero earns its place as one of the stronger action-gacha options currently running, not because it reinvented the genre, but because it kept refining the one thing that actually matters minute-to-minute: how the combat feels in your hands. The slow story opening and the eventual gacha ceiling keep it from a perfect score, but neither is disqualifying. Verdict: 8.6/10 — a confident recommendation for new and returning players alike.