Honkai Star Rail release date confirmed for April

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The release date leaked last month, but now it's official

Honkai Star Rail
(Image credit: Hoyoverse)

The Honkai Star Rail release date is officially set for April 26. This has been confirmed a few weeks after the date leaked via an app store listing.

To celebrate the news, developer and publisher miHoYo is holding a giveaway with a prize pool consisting of 100 gift cards, each worth $100 USD.

For the uninitiated, Honkai Star Rail is a new turn-based RPG from miHoYo, the developer behind the wildly popular Genshin Impact. Like Genshin, Honkai Star Rail will be a free-to-play game available on PC and mobile platforms, and it'll have an optional gacha system that seems very similar to its predecessor. 

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One key difference between the two games, aside from their completely different worlds, stories, and characters, is the combat system. Whereas Genshin Impact's combat is fast-paced and in real-time, Honkai Star Rail will have you duking it out in turn-based battles. Honkai also isn't strictly an open-world game, instead sending players on a semi-linear journey from planet to planet as they progress through a main story that follows the events of Honkai Impact 3rd, but is also self-contained so newcomers needn't worry about being lost.

Honkai Star Rail has already had three closed betas, and now there's just the race to the finish line before the game's launch next month.

Here are the best free games to play this weekend.

Jordan Gerblick
Jordan Gerblick
Staff Writer

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.