Arknights: Endfield Preview
If you’re a fan of tower defense games you might have played 2020’s Arknights. It was a free-to-play gacha game with puzzle elements, an engaging and unique take on the tower defense genre. Arknights: Endfield shares a few strands of DNA with the original game, but mostly it’s a surprising and impressive departure. Combining an anime-inspired action RPG with a Satisfactory-like building sim wasn’t on my bingo card.
So, What is It?
Arknights: Endfield takes place in the same fictional universe as the first game, but on a new earth-like planet called Talos II. You play as the “Endministrator” (or Edmin) of the Endfield corporation, and your tasks are twofold. First you need to beat back the supernatural Corruption, criminal factions and monsters on the planet. Second, you need to industrialize Talos-II for its valuable resources, which also help you level up.
Let me just say that the English voice acting in Arknights: Endfield is surprisingly strong. Unfortunately, the narrative and script are an absolute morass of made-up jargon, acronyms and lore. Hours in and I was still bewildered by the story’s details. Luckily, most of it doesn’t get in the way of either the action or the other game play loops.
Next level
Arknights; Endfield has three primary components: combat, exploration and base building, plus the gacha mechanics. However, the don’t all necessarily take up the same amount of time. Players looking for a predominantly action-RPG-focused game might be disappointed.
Combat in Arknights: Endfield is a variation on familiar ideas. You can have up to four characters (out of at least 20)Â in your squad, and you can switch at will between them in real time. When not being controlled, the AI does a decent job at surviving the encounter. But the big hook is the way each character’s abilities and special attacks synergize. Your main task in combat is to optimize and build up various meters in order to unleash powerful attacks, alone or in combination with the team.
Combat is fast, flashy, fun and frenetic. It takes a while to click, just like everything in the game. There are dodges and perfect dodges and weapons feel impactful. The combat experience generally feels extremely well polished and could easy carry the game.
Another Day at the Factory
Combat is only one element, however. Exploration is important, too, as it allows you to gather resources for upgrades and complete mission objectives. Hand in hand with exploration, building a range of towers, power grids, transportation nodes and processing factories will take up hours of time.
The early hours of Arknights: Endfield are focused on narrative and combat, but soon you’ll need to start laying down a grid to power various towers, and zip lines that will make traveling through the zone easier. One exciting feature is that while Arknights: Endfield is a single player game, you’ll be able to use structures set down by other players (not unlike in Death Stranding).
As the game progresses, your constructions become more elaborate. Eventually you will be building entirely factories in order to process minerals and other resources you collect on Talos-II. Building also means power management and you’ll need to connect to a new or existing power grid. While maybe not quite as densely featured as Factorio or Satisfactory, the construction sim elements in Arknights: Endfield are complex and will take hours and a lot of trial and error to grasp.
Triple-A Aspirations
There’s no getting around Arknights: Endfield’s gacha mechanics, which primarily exist for premium weapons, armor and cosmetics. Whether players want to engage with it or not, the grind for either currency and more pulls or simply to level up outside the gacha is real. It might take a long time to get there, but at some point most folks will probably invest some real world coin just to make things a little easier.
At least on the PC, Arknights: Endfield looks pretty impressive, especially when it comes to animations, lighting and combat effects. The environments look good too, if just a little lacking in textural detail. Characters are typical anime/waifu creations but cheekily acknowledge when the camera lingers a little too long on one body part or another. I have no idea how it will look on mobile devices but Arknights: Endfield feels like a polished product on PC and runs accordingly.
Arknights: Endfield did something very few games have done lately: it surprised me. A total departure from the first game, Arknights: Endfield offers dozens of hours of content that’s split between almost two entirely different game genres. On the combat action-RPG side, there’s a lot to enjoy thanks to the way abilities work together. When it comes to exploration and building, there’s an equal amount of material to explore. Maybe most surprising of all is that the pieces all logically fit together. I’m definitely interested in seeing how gamers respond to Arknights: Endfield, and how it develops.
***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***
