Honor of Kings: World preview – A visual and mechanical delight

Honor of Kings is one of those franchises you don’t hear much about in the West, but that are utterly, mindnumbingly massive in other parts of the world. TiMi Studio Group and Tencent, the names behind the IP, want to change that with their next action RPG, Honor of Kings: World.

HoK itself is a MOBA and its setting and characters are strongly rooted in Chinese mythology and folklore, which partly explains its massive popularity. The “Eastern Fantasy” moniker used by the developer for HoK: World fits without a doubt. But characters and worldview aren’t the only characteristics shared by the spin-off and the original.

The action RPG’s combat system looks to be heavily inspired by the MOBA, featuring a line-up of three skills and one ultimate ability per combat style — and there are tons of these styles you can pick from, which are in turn based on the fighting styles of HoK’s heroes (who are, in fact, appearing in the game to bestow them on you). If you’re a fan, the game immediately envelops you into comfortable familiarity with basically everything, though the title by no means requires you to have any pre-existing knowledge of the setting.

You can equip your character – fully created and customized by yourself – with a loadout of two of these fighting styles, which you can switch between freely during combat. In fact, these swaps are one of the core mechanics, as you’ll need to manage ability cooldowns and exploit synergies between the fighting styles.

This feels pretty good and keeps things varied, especially as fighting styles come with their own weapons, so you can easily switch between a set-up with dual-blades and two-handed claymore to something like polearm and pistol.

Being deeply rooted in Chinese culture, the fighting definitely features some wuxia elements like you see in classic martial arts flicks — you can hover in the air for a while as you fight and even continue dodging while airborne. This adds some real fluidity to the system that’s tangible right from the start.

It helped that the game’s spectacular intro section is fairly competent at teaching the player what to do along with providing a hook for the story. It seems like we and our buddies – all from the original game, I believe – are fighting a super evil bad guy and getting our butts kicked, so one of our super attractive lady friends sends our soul back in time or something? Anyway, we land in the sea and get rescued by another super hot guy – everyone in this world is mega attractive, naturally – who takes us to a magic school, where the game then kicks off for real and you get into its open-world exploration and story.

A lot of the dialog is already voiced in English – and in high quality, too, aside from some sync issues between voices and animations – so there is no barrier that would stop anyone from immersing themselves in the narrative, but I’ve played more than 20 games at Gamescom 2025, so I hope you can forgive my foggy memory around the exact story beats.

It’s not just the characters who look gorgeous — everything does. From the cut-scenes in the intro over the smooth combat animations to the vibrant-looking world you get transported to, it sets a high bar for its peers.

With a co-op mode promising to bring friends into the fray as well, Honor of Kings: World looks like it will offer a strong package to genre fans when it comes out at an as-yet unknown date as a free-to-play title.

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