About the game
Zenless Zone Zero is HoYoverse's gacha action RPG, set in New Eridu — the last city standing after dimensional rifts called Hollows swallowed the rest of the world. You play a Proxy: an off-the-books guide who walks squads of three Agents into those rifts, gets them out alive and bills for the trouble. Worth saying up front, because it shapes everything else: this is a largely single-player game with occasional co-op content. It's not an MMO, and it's not an infinite-loot ARPG.
Combat that actually lands
Combat is the heart of the game and, by a wide margin, its strongest suit. It's real-time action built on three verbs: perfect dodge, parry and chained character swap. Punishing an attack at the right instant doesn't just save you — it brings the next Agent on screen with the advantage, and once an enemy is Stunned the window for group finishers opens. The result is a rhythm you learn in ten minutes and are still sharpening months later. All of it wrapped in a loud, street-level, extravagantly animated art direction that separates it effortlessly from Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail — if the tone of those two bounced you off, this is a different animal.
Outside of fights, New Eridu works as a hub: streets to wander, arcades, commissions, recurring faces and an episodic story that refreshes with every new version, every six weeks. It's a free download on PC — through Steam or the studio's own launcher — plus PS5, Xbox Series X|S, iOS and Android, with cross-save and shared progression: farm on your phone, fight the bosses on the TV, lose nothing in between.
What you pay for, and what you don't
Entry costs nothing; the ceiling is set by the gacha. Banners are called Signal Search, and each pull runs 160 Polychrome (1,600 for a ten-pull). On limited Agent channels hard pity sits at 90 pulls, soft pity kicks in around 75, and your first S-Rank is a 50/50: lose it and the next featured unit is guaranteed. Weapons — W-Engines — live on their own separate channel, with their own rules and their own opportunity cost.
The two recurring real-money sinks are the Inter-Knot Membership (a 30-day subscription of around USD 5 that pays out currency instantly plus a daily trickle for logging in) and the season pass, bought per version. What matters more is what isn't sold: no story content sits behind a paywall, and there is no PvP, so spending speeds up access to characters and builds — it never buys an edge over another player. Patient free-to-play is entirely viable; anniversary patches have handed out 130-plus pulls, a limited S-Rank of your choice and a limited W-Engine of your choice.
Where the game stands today
It's alive and running like clockwork: a new version every six weeks, each with characters, events and story. The third content season kicked off in mid-2026 and brought two structural additions — the floating region of Roscaelifer, with noticeably more open exploration than the early chapters, and the Steam release. The lingering gap is co-op: Joint Investigation exists, a genuine three-player PvE mode where each player controls a single Agent, but it arrived as a limited-time event rather than a permanent pillar. If you're after something to play with friends every night, this isn't it. On the numbers, it has cleared USD 600 million on mobile alone, while PC is more modest: an all-time peak near 28,000 concurrent players on Steam and a usual base between 8,000 and 15,000. The big community lives on phones and consoles.
Who it's for (and who it isn't)
It's for anyone who wants a genuine action game with an urban anime look, no entry fee and no schedule to keep: log in, clear your commissions, play the new chapter, come back in six weeks. It's also for players who enjoy team-building and squeezing synergies out of Agents, because that's where the real depth sits. You can browse the cast and what's currently running on the official site.
The bad, plainly: farming Drive Discs — the stat gear — stacks layers of RNG that drag any endgame build out to the point of tedium, and the late content has uneven difficulty spikes that stop you cold if you didn't invest in the right character. Add that the gacha, however generous, is still a gacha: bad streaks happen. On the other side of the ledger, the studio has proven it listens — it removed the divisive "TV mode" that weighed down the opening hours outright, and it keeps polishing combat responsiveness version after version. If the action appeals and you can live with gear randomness, it's hard to find another free game that feels this good in the hands.