Truth be told, I had no interest in Black Beacon after I saw the first trailer. It looked good, but the trailer didn't show anything that would pique my interest. Not long before the launch, I learned about the pre-registration and decided to take another look at it. That is how I discovered a 4-star character named Ninsar. She was given out for free as a pre-registration reward, and in my completely subjective yet undoubtedly superior opinion, she has one of the best character designs ever made. After the game launched globally on April 10th (except for 3 countries, but more about that later), I immediately jumped in.

Impressive quality

The first thing that surprised me about Black Beacon was the overall polish. As far as I'm aware, it is the first game from a relatively new company (Mingzhou Network Technology, established in 2021). I know that some people working on the game have a prior industry experience, but participating in a project is very different from leading a project. Despite that, Black Beacon is one of the highest quality games in this genre I've ever played.

First of all, the visuals are impeccable. The interface is clean, consistent, and very intuitive. The character designs are not as flashy as you might see in other games, but they are very detailed and quite unique, especially the characters from the Eme-an faction.

The scene design is no less impressive. During the first couple of chapters, I was a bit worried that the whole story was going to take place inside the library. The library's design is pretty cool, but it feels a bit too desolate and lacking color except for a couple of places. However, once I got to Qian, my worries were alleviated because that region feels entirely different and very refreshing.

A special mention should go to these artworks that we get during the story. It's something straight from an art gallery.

Apart from the visuals, there's also the sound quality. I'm not talking about music. The music is great, but I'm not someone who pays significant attention to music in games. The one thing that I notice instantly though is the sound effects. Navigating, using items, leveling up characters, performing different kinds of actions is usually accompanied by sound effects, and not many games make them truly enjoyable. Black Beacon does. It's a pleasure to interact with the interface. The only other game with such enjoyable sound effects that I've played is Reverse 1999.

A good amount of content

I play a lot of different live service games. I don't have time to do every single quest, every event and every challenge that they offer. Therefore, I highly value games that have enough content to still have something to do by the end of a version, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming for people who play more than a couple of games. I would say Black Beacon falls in this category. I haven't completed the available story yet, but despite there being plenty of chapters, every stage is relatively short, so you could finish everything in a few days if you wanted.

Apart from the story, there are three challenge modes: Tome of Fate, Infinite Multiverse and Trial of Prophecy. There's nothing unique about them. If you've played challenge modes in other games, they will feel very familiar. Tome of Fate is the one that you definitely need to do because that's how you obtain character equipment.

Unlike the traditional challenge modes, the events seem quite unique so far. The first one was an idle event where you had to manage numerous monkeys typing on typewriters.

Later, we had a simple, yet pretty interesting strategy/puzzle event where we had to prevent Enki from escaping. I say simple, but the later stages became quite difficult.

Overall, plenty of good stuff, but it doesn't feel like the game is pressuring you to play it every day.

Some of the best features among gacha games

I am a big fan of stage-based games. Don't get me wrong, open world is wonderful. I'm enjoying Wuthering Waves, I'm still playing Genshin Impact, and I'll give upcoming open world games a try as well, but they are time hogs. They have countless quests and massive areas to explore. Sometimes it feels very overwhelming, especially if the game has been around for years. In addition to that, all the content in an open world game needs to be tied to the world somehow, which can be very limiting. Being a stage-based game, Black Beacon doesn't suffer from it, but unlike the majority of similar games, it actually offers some amount of exploration. You can run around the stage looking for chests and doing small interactions that are not part of the main story. As a big fan of exploration (when I have nothing else to do), I find this aspect very pleasing.

4-star characters in this game don't feel like they are added just to make the pulling experience more interesting. I haven't seen any reliable tier list from people who like to do calculations, but apparently many of the current 4-star characters are very capable, and it does feel like that. They also get their very own 5-star signature weapons.

Speaking about weapons, Black Beacon is one of the few real-time combat games where characters are not tied to a specific weapon type. They use all kinds of crazy objects as their weapons. Just look at Enki's weapon! What is that even? I love it.

The only other game that I know with this approach is Punishing: Gray Raven, and it's one of my favorite features ever because it provides the freedom for developers to create characters with a unique combat style that doesn't feel like a slight variation of another character. Games like Wuthering Waves and Genshin Impact try to circumvent the limitation of a small set of weapon types by using a generic type like a rectifier or a catalyst that is not even a part of the character's move set. Even Honkai Impact 3rd does this despite having a much larger set of weapon types. I strongly dislike such an approach. Just add unique weapons for characters that need them! Zenless Zone Zero has removed weapons entirely, replacing them with W engines, which resembles turn-based games and is better, but still not ideal.

The downside to unique weapons is obviously the need to pull for them, but you don't have to equip the 5-star weapon on every character right away. In most cases, a 4-star version which is much easier to obtain will be enough until you save the funds to upgrade.

The gacha system of Black Beacon is also great. It has a 70% probability of getting the banner character with a hard pity of 70 pulls, and a 100% probability of getting the banner weapon with a hard pity of 50 pulls. The pity also caries over to the upcoming banners. It doesn't get any better than this (no, 100% on everything is not better, but that's a topic for another day).

The game has a sweep feature, and I strongly believe every game should have it. Even open world games should have it. It makes character building a lot less of a pain than it would otherwise be. You go to the resource stage, you select how much stamina you want to spend, and you're done. It also makes daily tasks easier.

Finally, Black beacon has plenty of costume options (skins). The most of the money I spend on gacha games goes into character costumes. I get that not everyone will care about this aspect, but having the ability to customize the look of your favorite characters is amazing. In the case of Black Beacon, every single character has an alternative costume that you can obtain for free by increasing their affection level.

I would love to hear the thought process of making Black Beacon from the developers because it feels like they are trying to alleviate a lot of frustration that players might have with other gacha games.

Black Beacon developers do things differently

I want to briefly touch upon a couple of curious decisions that the Black Beacon developers have made. In the very beginning, I mentioned that the game wasn't available in three countries at launch, and these countries include Japan, Korea, and most surprisingly, China. As far as I'm aware, it's the first Chinese game that launched globally before China. It might have been because of some legal formalities or publishing deals, but the fact remains.

I saw people complaining that the global audience was used as beta testers, which is absurd. That's not how you do a beta test. You don't test on a larger audience before releasing for a smaller audience. Furthermore, if we make a crazy assumption that it was a beta test, why would you complain? Who in their right mind would complain about getting the access to a game early?

The second unconventional thing about this game is the voice-over language options. Whenever a Chinese game launches globally, you can expect that among the voice-over languages there will be Japanese, but English is not guaranteed. Most will have it, but it's quite common to see Japanese as the default option for Global. Even an old game like Honkai Impact 3rd that has been around for years doesn't offer an English voice over. Black Beacon did the opposite — it provided a full English voice-over, but not Japanese. Firstly, it's very surprising. For some people, myself included, even disappointing, but secondly it clearly shows that despite the controversy that I will discuss later, the developers care about the global audience a lot.

A very enjoyable gameplay

Let's talk about the character mechanics and the combat system for a moment! As is the standard for RPGs, Black Beacon characters have certain roles, even though I don't consider them to be strict classes. They also have one of the 5 available elements: fire, thunder, water, light, dark. All elements cause a specific reaction on the enemy, but I find it to be a bit of a missed opportunity because there is only one reaction that occurs when two elements interact with each other — overload. I think they should have stolen some ideas from Genshin Impact to make the reaction system more interesting. In any case, just like in Genshin, mono element teams are not ideal because you want to get that sweet extra damage from overload, so you should always have at least 2 elements in your teams.

The combat system is pretty standard. You have a team of 3 characters, a basic attack, two skills, an ultimate, a doge, and a parry. Apart from that, there is one unique mechanic where you get to spam character skills when the combo burst meter is full, and occasionally, you get a stage-specific skill like pausing time or generating a shield. The combat requires some skill, but it's not overly complex and it feels very fluid. Definitely one of the best combat experiences.

One more cool feature of Black Beacon is the ability to switch the camera mode between a top-down view and a free view. I always use the top-down view because it's ideal for touchscreens, especially the smaller ones, but the ability to switch is very welcome. I don't know if Black Beacon supports a controller, but that would be a great use case for the free view.

Issues and the great controversy

As much as I love Black Beacon, it's not perfect. The two main issues that I see are the lack of a desktop client and the lack of Japanese voice over for the story.

I believe a proper desktop client is a must for a live-service game. It adds a guarantee that the game won't disappear overnight because of Apple and Google, it allows lower prices for in-game purchases, and it opens the game to a wider audience that doesn't have a decent mobile device to run it. I tried playing it on Google Play Games, but it was a terrible experience. If you are interested in Black Beacon, don't even think about using it! Stick with a phone or a tablet!

As for the voice-over language, I am very used to playing games in Japanese. Therefore, Black beacon feels a bit off despite the great English voice acting. The game already has Japanese voices for the characters, so I assume a story voice over is coming in the future, but I haven't seen any mention of it.

Those are my gripes. Apart from them, the game has been running flawlessly on my device, but apparently it's not the case for everyone. Their Discord server has a bug report channel, and it's filled with complaints. A black screen and regular crashes seem to be the most common ones. A translation issue is mentioned a lot as well, and I have experienced it myself, but it's not a game-breaking problem. It's just a text in a couple of places in the user interface that most people won't read anyway.

The most discussed problem at launch was the inability to log in with Google. It didn't stop anyone from playing because you can play as a guest for as long as you want, and you can also use other login methods, but it still upset plenty of players. Ironically, it's not really a developers' mistake. This problem happens because of a mechanism called rate limits, which in this case is set by Google. The developers can request and increase, but the documentation says it can take up to 5 days for the increase to come in effect.

Sounds like too many bugs, but please name one game in this genre that didn't launch with numerous issues! Take Wuthering Waves, for example! Its launch was pretty bad. The game was unplayable for many people, and the company had to give out heaps of compensation to keep players happy, which is where the Black Beacon management or more precisely the publisher for global stumbled.

Many live service games have this weird practice where the developer company is not the one distributing the game. In the case of Black Beacon, there are two publishers: one for China, and one for global. Since the game launched for global first, the global publisher was the one who made the decision about the compensation for all the issues that we were facing, which included 30 free pulls on the permanent banners. That is actually very generous, but unlike every other game, it was not automatic. You had to use a code that was valid for 3 days to get the compensation. I intend to write a separate article to convey my thoughts about rewards and compensation in gacha games, but no matter how you look at this approach, it's bad. The players weren't too happy about it. However, it didn't cause the big controversy. It was caused by the compensation from the Chinese publisher weeks later.

The above screenshot was shared all over the place, and it shows 20 free pulls for the permanent banners, 10 pulls for the limited banners and, most importantly, a permanent 5-star character selector delivered automatically through the in-game mail. Uh-oh! Needless to say, it caused a storm of hatred from the global players once they learned about it. Admittedly, I was in the same boat for the first couple of days, but I prefer not to make hasty judgments.

I didn't know about the lack of communication between developers and both publishers, which was explained in a tweet later on.

I had assumed they saw a negative response from the global players about their compensation and decided to do better for the Chinese side of things. It's a new game, after all. As long as they learn and improve, I'm willing to stick with it. I didn't quit. In fact, I kept playing daily. I didn't bombard their socials with angry messages, and I definitely didn't ask for a refund because that's just silly. I waited. Despite the sour taste in my mouth, I wanted to see how they would treat both player bases going forward.

Luckily, they changed or at least promised to change their approach and work in a closer collaboration between all involved parties. They also balanced the compensation for all players, so in addition to some extra pulls we did get our 5-star selector. All's well that ends well, right? Hmm… not exactly. At the end of the day, there will always be people who just need something to hate, and the game developers and publishers can't do anything to please them. Maybe it's for the best because it's clear to me that those people didn't really enjoy the game to begin with, yet their anger is the reason a good change is happening.

My hopes for the future of Black Beacon

I have been playing this game long enough to avoid the recency bias in my evaluation of it. I genuinely think it's a masterpiece and I hope that it will get over the rough start and become a successful title. It will probably never reach the likes of Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail or even Wuthering Waves, but it can definitely build a relatively large and devoted audience.

As for my wishes regarding the game's features, a desktop client and a full Japanese voice over are the obvious ones, but there are a few more.

An option to do the exploration of already completed stages without triggering the story again would be very welcome. I know for a fact I've missed a few things like chests here and there, and I want to go back, but I would rather not recap the story that's still fresh in my mind.

Something similar to a dorm system would also be nice. Even though I might be one of the few people who actually enjoys it. At the very least, they could give us an option to display several characters on the main screen.

Lastly, I hope there will be multiple variations of the same character. Yes, the main reason I want that is to get a 5-star version of Ninsar, but it is a great feature overall because it keeps all characters relevant indefinitely, allows for much more extensive character development and makes fans of those characters happy.

That's about it. I haven't discussed the story at all because I want to dedicate a separate article to it, but it is outstanding, and it should satisfy every story and lore enjoyer out there. I'll keep playing and supporting Black Beacon, and I hope you will too.