Arknights: Endfield Review – Fighting, Factories and Lotsa Gacha

Arknights: Endfield Review

When I previewed Arknights: Endfield a few months ago, I was impressed by its unique combination of game play elements. Balancing exploration, combat, factory construction, and gacha mechanics is no easy task. Even more daunting is trying to make the recipe remotely coherent. Having spent time with the final version of the game, I’ll say this: there’s a lot going on. Whether it adds up to more than shallow busywork is the question.

A Sort-Of Sequel

Arknights: Endfield is a distantly related spinoff of 2019’s Arknights from Chinese developer Hypergryph. Arknights combined tower defense mechanics with a gacha system. For Arknights: Endfield, the developer has turned up the knob to 11 on the ambition scale. The new game brings together semi-open world third-person action, a complex factory simulator, exploration, and ever-present (i.e. intrusive) gacha mechanics. After all, Arknights: Endfield is a free-to-play game and Hypergryph has to pay the bills somehow.

Arknights: Endfield starts simply enough. You play as the eye-rollingly named Endministrator, an initially amnesiac hero who has suddenly reappeared and is poised to lead the Endfield corporation’s exploitation…er, exploration…of the Earthlike planet Talos 2. It’s not that the game’s story is bad, exactly. But it’s full of plot beats and character types you’ve seen countless times before. There’s an endless amount of jargon-filled dialogue, too, but a lot of it is skippable, with helpful summaries of what you breezed through. The English voice acting gets the job done, though it can be understated to the point of becoming a little lifeless. The story takes a good long time to heat up, but it gets there.

While we’re talking about Arknights: Endfield’s selling points, let’s acknowledge that by and large, the game looks very good. The environments are colorful and the manmade structures glisten. Character design is about what you’d expect for the genre (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), though there’s no character creator beyond selecting a gender.  Animations are fluid and visually, combat is flashy to the point of being a little hard to parse on occasion. A lot of the visual polish is surface level, because interactions with the environment are gated by invisible walls and other mechanics. Overall, Arknights: Endfield is easy on the eyes.

Sizzle and Steak

Like so much of Arknights: Endfield, combat makes an initial positive impression.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much to keep the good times going past a certain point. You have the expected basic moves: light and heavy attacks, special attacks, and an ultimate ability on a timer. There’s a kind-of-clunky dodge roll and perfect dodge mechanic. For the first few hours, it’s satisfying enough.

It doesn’t take long before you’ve assembled your first four-member squad of Operators, each with their own unique moves and abilities. The goal, of course, is to synergize the player’s skills with those of the Operators. Mechanically, it’s easy to do. Controls are very straightforward and getting into a combat flow state, switching between Operators, and triggering their ultimate abilities becomes second nature.

Adding to your collection of Operator teammates and improving their skills and weapons is at the heart of Arknights: Endfield’s gacha systems and even its factory mechanics (we’ll get to that shortly). The perfection is ruined a bit by enemies that lack variety and Operators that likewise become somewhat indistinguishable in combat. By mid-into-late game, you’ve seen most of the variations on human and non-human enemy types. When not being directly controlled, Operators on their own tend to spam basic attacks and not much more. What this means is that instead of becoming increasingly engaging, combat becomes increasingly familiar.

The Factory Factor

Arknights: Endfield is more than an action game. A major component is a surprisingly full-featured factory simulator. Ultimately, the point of your factories is to refine and process different minerals found in various regions of the world to create upgrades for weapons and gear. Factories are intricate assemblies of power lines, mining, processing, and refining stations. It can be very satisfying to tinker around, creating the most efficient assembly system possible.

Unlike factory sims like Satisfactory or Factorio, however, factories in Arknights: Endfield are a means to an end. They’re not exercises in creativity. Once you’ve got them kitted out, they mostly run themselves. Keeping in line with the factory system, you can also build tower defense-like structures to keep your factories and base safe from enemy attacks.

The integration of systems in Arknights: Endfield is a two-edged sword. On one hand, it all makes sense when it could have been a messy hodgepodge. Exploration and combat provide open territory and new resources, which require factories to provide upgrades to make combat more successful. All of this generates XP and other currency which feed into the game’s gacha mechanics and the ability to pull for new operators or weapons. The downside of this integration is that you can’t simply focus on or enjoy any one aspect of the game. At first, factories are fun to build. But they’re just a means to an end. Each of Endfield’s systems is constrained by the others.

The Beginning and the End

Those of us reviewing Arknights: Endfield were given a pre-rolled late game save so we could experience all the systems at capacity. A couple of things became clear. First, as the game moves into the mid and later game phases, the gacha becomes dominant, requiring the completion of daily events and their rewards, gifting a stable of Operators to keep them happy and other busy work, not to mention pulling for the various banners and all the complication (or fun, depending) that entails. The UI becomes incredibly convoluted and dense with both relevant information and what feels like noise. Late-stage combat contains a wealth of new special abilities and impressive effects thanks to the evolving roster of Operators. That said, exploration, combat, and construction become less important in their own rights. It’s all about the gacha grind. For fans of the genre, that’s not a bad thing, of course. If, that is, you connect with the game’s specific implementation of it.

For a free-to-play game, Arknights: Endfield offers a wealth of well-made content. The factory building, tower defense mechanics, exploration, and team-based combat elements offer engaging hours of play, certainly worth the price of admission for fans of those genres. Mid to late game, Arknight: Endfield loses a bit of luster, devolving into more tedious gacha mechanics and not evolving its systems enough to keep the fun going for more casual players.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***