Honkai: Nexus Anima Wows Gamescom, But HoYoverse Still Won’t Confirm PS5
HoYoverse let Gamescom 2026 attendees get hands-on with Honkai: Nexus Anima at its booth in Hall 6.1 in Cologne from August 26-30, and the verdict from multiple outlets who played it lines up: it’s an odd, colourful autochess-meets-creature-collector hybrid that’s more interesting than its “Pokémon rival” tag suggests. What still isn’t confirmed is whether any of it will ever touch a PS5.
Nexus Anima arrives as the fifth instalment in the series, featuring characters from Honkai Impact 3rd and Honkai: Star Rail, according to Insider Gaming, and it marks HoYoverse’s first real swing at the monster-taming genre Pokémon built. The demo builds shown at Gamescom weren’t a first look either; the game already ran two closed betas this year before the show floor.
Reaction from the show floor split pretty cleanly between people charmed by the world and people unconvinced by the combat:
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A Chessboard Full of Monsters
Strip away the anime dressing and Nexus Anima is an autochess game with a Pokémon skin stapled on top. Kakuchopurei summed it up bluntly: it’s a hybrid of a Pokemon mothership title and Riot Games’ Team Fight Tactics, and it is as addictive as it sounds. You capture creatures called Anima, arrange them on a board, and then watch the fight play out on autopilot once the round starts.
MMORPG.com’s Gamescom demo dropped players straight into the middle of the story with a pre-built roster, no tutorial. The account came with many Anima already in the roster, and while Nexus Anima is related to Honkai Impact 3rd and Honkai: Star Rail, familiar faces like Kiana from HI3 and Blade from HSR only showed up as power-ups called Kardia cards. Anyone who’s grinded Star Rail’s Currency Wars mode will recognise the shape of it instantly; that mode’s autochess-inspired mechanics carried over almost directly.
The tone is stranger than the marketing lets on, too. MMORPG.com’s earlier closed-beta preview found the writing genuinely offbeat, noting that Nexus Anima pairs HoYoverse production values with writing that is genuinely strange and a combat system with real ideas of its own, even if it will take some time before it truly lands. That self-aware weirdness apparently runs deep: one build locked the game’s luck stat permanently to “Unlucky” as a joke.
One Hour Split Opinion Right Down the Middle
Not everyone left convinced. Pocket Gamer’s Iwan went in cold as a HoYoverse outsider and came away torn on the combat itself. Asked whether he’d return to it, he wrote “probably not,” since autochess simply wasn’t his style of combat, even though it still forms a core part of the overall gameplay. Even so, he admitted he could appreciate the vibrant, Pokémon-style world and what it does to distinguish itself from HoYoverse’s existing catalogue, and it won him over by the end despite starting sceptical.
MMORPG.com’s follow-up Gamescom piece landed somewhere similar: intrigued, not sold. One hour without a tutorial left the writer feeling more interested than before, but without enough knowledge of the autochess combat to fully judge its efficacy, and while it nails the basics expected from HoYoverse, it’ll have to go further to stand out from past successes. Push Square, by contrast, came out the most enthusiastic of the bunch, saying the demo left them wanting the game on console.
Still No PS5 in Sight, Despite Star Rail’s Track Record
Here’s the part that’ll frustrate console players. HoYoverse has had superb success with Honkai: Star Rail on Sony’s console, but Nexus Anima feels much more mobile focused than any of its other games, Push Square’s Gamescom hands-on noted. The outlet tested it on an iPad Mini and reckoned it would translate to a controller without much fuss, but that’s a hope, not a promise.
All of HoYoverse’s titles feature cross-save, and it’d be nice to switch between the big screen and mobile play here, so there’s hope the dev is considering a console port, since other auto battlers on PS5 prove the format can work. For context on how long that wait could be: Star Rail launched on PC and mobile in April 2023 and didn’t reach PS5 until October 11 that year, roughly six months later. If HoYoverse follows its own pattern, a PS5 version of Nexus Anima wouldn’t land until well after a PC/mobile launch that hasn’t even been dated yet.
Our view: banking on a HoYoverse console port before the mobile version even ships is a bad habit this fanbase keeps repeating. Genshin and Star Rail both got there eventually, but “eventually” has meant months of PS5 owners watching from the sidelines every single time.
No Release Date Yet, Two Betas Down
Nexus Anima has already been through a proper testing cycle. The first closed beta, the Nexus Bond Test, ran in September 2025 on PC and iOS. The second, the Evolution Test, opened to PC, Android and iOS players on July 9, 2026, adding creature evolution and rarer “Chromatic” Anima variants before wrapping later that month. Gamescom was the next public touchpoint after that, and HoYoverse used it to hand out demo time rather than announce a launch window.
No global release date has been set for any platform. Given the beta cadence HoYoverse has run through for its other live-service titles, a full commercial launch landing before the end of 2026 looks unlikely on the current evidence.
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We’d rather HoYoverse just say the quiet part out loud on console plans instead of leaving Push Square, MMORPG.com and everyone else guessing at every show. Until then, PC, iOS and Android are the only platforms confirmed, and the next chance to check for news is whatever HoYoverse’s next livestream brings.
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