Review - Arknights: Endfield - Promising, but Slow-Paced

Gacha games have much in common with card games and the formula of modern free-to-play titles: they always have a cost, whether to your wallet or your time. It's the inevitable maxim of contemporary titles, and it's always up to the player to decide how far they want to go with that product — a question that often culminates in "Am I still having fun?"

Just like TCGs, despite the existence of a competitive and optimized segment, most of the gaming audience wants to have fun. They want the product to deliver hours of distraction and immersion within its systems, for the plot, characters, and mechanics to work to keep them entertained for as long as possible, and they expect to give very little in return for this experience. After all, they are already voluntarily offering the most precious resource they have: time.

The exchange is as straightforward as it can get: the player offers time, and the game provides fun. In the world of gacha and free-to-play, titles like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves stand out for being fun in their own way; Genshin through a vivid open world and characters that move a legion of fans, and Waves bets on more challenging combat and a deeper plot to engage its audience.

The new Arknights: Endfield, released on January 22nd for PC, PlayStation 5, Android, and iOS, is Hypergryph's latest title to challenge the market giants — and at the moment of its official launch, it doesn't succeed.

As a spin-off of Arknights — the acclaimed tower defense game from the same developer — Endfield abandons the strategic formula for the open-world action RPG genre, placing itself directly in competition with the genre's established games. Its differentiator, beyond all the baggage the Arknights franchise already carries, is its proposal to combine exploration, dynamic combat with a full party, and resource management through a factory system, along with notable visual quality.

All this innovation, however, stumbles over structural problems common to the gacha genre and design decisions that make Endfield fail in the fundamental purpose of any game — there are frequent pacing issues, an excess of tutorials, and many barriers that compromise the title's intuitiveness for those seeking some casual hours of fun, which corresponds to a major portion of the free-to-play audience today.

Before the content, there's the presentation, and Arknights: Endfield excels in visuals. Running on a modified version of Unity, the title delivers graphics that rival and even surpass some more traditional productions in the genre that also aim for the same aesthetic style. We can segment this aspect of the work into two axes: characters and world.

The character design is predictable. The primary goal of any gacha system is to sell something the player believes they need, whether to optimize their build, to have all the characters in their collection, or just to have the one they like the most — to this end, it's necessary to offer an extensive roster of characters with varied styles that end up captivating some specific segment of the audience.

Endfield has all the stereotypes and visuals expected from a game of its genre, with its own artistic touch, but still strictly follows the standards you'd expect to find in the roster of any gacha.

The world, on the other hand, maintains more rigid choices from Arknights' baggage, blending fantasy elements with an industrial-spatial aesthetic. The excellent use of presentation in the scenery stands out, with a mix of lighting and color palettes for environments and characters.

The explorable regions of Talos-II — the planet where the plot unfolds — leave a bit to be desired in the first hours, filled with scenarios and enemies that seem generic after an initially jaw-dropping opening. It takes a long time to start seeing more variety and elements that differentiate Endfield's maps from the molds already established by other works.

Outstanding Soundtrack

The soundtrack is another striking highlight, and Endfield deserves due recognition for this care. Composed of a mix of orchestral themes and electronic elements, Endfield's music works to capture the atmosphere of its setting and amplify the player's immersive experience.

The soundtrack even includes promotional material in partnership with the band Starset for the song We Are Empire. The choice of the band for one of the game's main promotional materials fits masterfully with the Dustin Bates' project, which blends alternative metal with science fiction elements both in the songs and in the construction of Starset's lore.

Another highlight in the roster of artists is the band One Republic, whose song Give Me Something was also used as promotional material for the game.

The combat system of Arknights: Endfield follows much of the formula established by its competitors: real-time action with character switching, dodging, special skills, and combos. However, the game introduces an important change that significantly improves the visual and gameplay experience, especially for those more accustomed to single-player Action RPGs: you don't need to actively switch between characters all the time.

Endfield allows your party to function more autonomously. Your companions act on their own during combat, using basic attacks, and you can activate their skills without needing to switch to them.

Of all its unique features, this is the most remarkable and main differentiator of the work from other gacha titles. With sufficient future patches to improve the game's quality of life and pacing, a party management system where you can walk, jump, run, and fight alongside your allies on the map is attractive enough to make certain audiences interested in choosing Endfield as a game worth their time and, perhaps, even their money.

The command system follows the standard of Action RPGs with basic attacks, skills, and combos, plus a Stagger system — a bar that fills as the enemy takes damage, immobilizing them for a short time once it's full — that makes battles a constant flow between filling your skill points with basic attacks and using special skills and combos at the ideal timing to maximize damage or cancel an enemy attack.

In a way, Endfield has direct inheritances from several other titles inside and outside Gacha, and the combat pacing is reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII Remake, where filling the enemy's Stagger bar is key to finishing fights, and skills are filled by basic attacks instead of a waiting timer.

Each character has their own fighting style and subcategory, and the game divides each one's "role" well, which makes it easier to create your own team and maintain balance between damage, resistance, and healing. If it maintains this standard without waves of power creep that turn every character into DPS in the future or make other roles redundant, Endfield could stand out in the genre as a title where your party matters for much more than just dealing the highest possible damage.

On the other hand, the basic attacks are too "basic." There's a lack of responsiveness or variety in commands that would make performing a specific action or movement more rewarding, and it often makes combat trivial in repeating the "A -> B -> C" pattern (Attack to fill bars -> Neutralize with Stagger -> Use special skills and combos) — there are enemies that demand more planning and timing, but at the time of the official launch, they are in the minority.

One of the biggest innovations — and targets of criticism — in Arknights: Endfield is the Automated Industry Complex system. It's a fully functional factory where you build facilities and logistical production lines to automate the collection and processing of resources.

Your base functions as the axis of your in-game economy. Everything you need in some way to progress is produced there, and your goal is to automate resource collection and processing — in short: you cannot ignore the factory's progress.

The system continues to work even when you are exploring or disconnected, turning it into a constant source of progression that becomes gradually more mandatory as equipment upgrades and other resources become available.

Managing your Factory is a surprisingly deep mechanic, where you need to plan production chains, power grids, logistics, plantations, and more. Whenever the player explores the world, they receive resources and outposts that expand their production network and add more specific mechanics for each region, rewarding them with progression materials and items.

Endfield's problems begin with it. Although interesting and innovative, the system suffers from excessive complexity for a game that already bombards newcomers with extensive tutorials that explain every aspect of the system but does so in a fragmented and unintuitive way.

Those unfamiliar with builders like Factorio will feel intimidated by the resource management and semi-obligation that the AIC imposes on the player, who will feel compelled to search for online tutorials to build their base. Although the game offers blueprints that help automate the process by building functional structures, the very existence of this option only reinforces that the system is too complex for its own good.

It's frustrating because, once you understand the logic behind it, the factory becomes one of the most satisfying parts of Endfield — but getting to that point requires patience, dedication, and trial and error that many players won't have for a game of this genre, either because it ruins the experience for those expecting more action or because before introducing you to the Factory system, the title has already overwhelmed you with dozens of other tutorials.

Even more hindered by tutorials is the story pacing. Arknights: Endfield makes the mistake of turning its first segment — which takes several hours to complete — into a giant step-by-step guide disguised as a plot.

You are bombarded with exposition about the world, its factions, Originium technology, and political conflicts, but all of this is presented as fragmented as possible without enough context or connection to create engagement and keep the player interested in the plot and in the game.

The developers made a complex title; they know they did, and the consideration of explaining meticulously is an element that could be appreciated under other circumstances, but the tutorial segments are dragged out and so glued together that it gives the feeling of learning how to work instead of how to play, reflected both in an initial experience that severely limits the player's freedom and in a narrative experience that offers very little in the first hours.

Endfield's story also suffers from the same issue that has chronically plagued the gacha genre for years: a generic protagonist lacking any charisma.

You take on the role of an Endministrator — a commander responsible for leading exploration and reconstruction operations on Talos-II. All characters respect you and act as if you were a great hero or the literal savior of the planet. The problem is that, for many hours, your protagonist is just that: a vehicle for the plot to advance, without personality, interesting conflicts, or motivations. You are the hero because they say you are the hero, nothing more.

Gacha games lack a protagonist that makes you want to play as them outside of potential builds, stats, or upgrades. The "amnesiac hero" trope has been used in several works of the genre, and in all of them, they still lack good construction to make the development of their own story interesting — whether due to the slow pace at which more details about them are revealed or because the character construction itself becomes completely irrelevant and fails to provide something on par with expectations.

It's inevitable not to compare the Endministrator with the heroes of other titles: Genshin Impact, despite also having a notably generic protagonist, compensates with a charismatic support cast that carries the narrative from the beginning. In Wuthering Waves, Rover, the player character, has much more participation and personality in the overall plot development, sometimes even overshadowing other narrative traits that could have received more attention.

Endfield manages to combine the worst of both worlds: an empty protagonist in a setting where even the secondary characters take too long to become interesting outside of aesthetics or attempts to captivate the target audience's popular imagination.

After many hours, the plot begins to gain traction and highlights that there are good plans for Arknights' future, but how many players will have the patience to reach that point when other alternatives in the market offer more immediate experiences? How rewarding will it be for this new player to spend so much time dragging themselves through tutorials and slow story and gameplay pacing?

Like every gacha, Arknights: Endfield comes with the full package of divisive practices: it's free to play but essentially forces you to log in daily to avoid falling behind, with the famous list of rewards for specific actions ranging from gaining levels and spending Sanity to defeating enemies, ensuring the player has "tasks" to do.

Daily missions, login rewards, limited-time events — all the tricks from the manual are here to create a sense of urgency and fear of missing out. For those with busy routines or who want to play at their own pace without the obligation of logins and always opening the game just to do or receive something, added to the already mentioned wall of tutorials, it transforms the experience into the feeling of having a second, unpaid job — or one where you pay a monthly subscription just to be there.

The Factory system helps, in part, by providing another motivator to log in, since it performs work offline. But, at the end of the day, it's still about making a commitment to be there daily doing something for a few hours or minutes, with activities that are only worthwhile if you're having fun; otherwise, it becomes an obligation.

The Pull and Pity System

Like every free-to-play game, it also has a monetized system for obtaining new operators and presents questionable decisions that place it behind its main competitors.

The most troublesome part lies in the number of different currencies and poorly elaborated explanations on the in-game banner pages. Among multiple forms of soft currency and low success rates, the system becomes confusing and demotivating, forcing players to conduct external research to understand which resource to prioritize and how to spend it efficiently.

The pull system works, like in other titles, based on a specific percentage. Operators are divided into four, five, or six stars — each with a distinct success rate: four stars have a 91.2% chance of being pulled, five stars have 8%, and the coveted six stars have 0.8%.

The guarantee of rewards after a certain number of unsuccessful pulls — the famous pity — exists, but it seems much less generous than its competitors, and like other mechanics, it's too confusing to understand intuitively in the game's menus.

A five-star character is guaranteed every 10 pulls, but the challenge and complexity are at the highest ranking: at 65 pulls, Endfield activates the "soft pity," which increases your chances of obtaining a six-star character by 5% for each successive pull.

At 80 pulls, the game activates the "hard pity," where the next pull is guaranteed a six-star character, with a 50% chance of it being the banner character and 50% of it being another one. This pull does not guarantee that the next six-star will be the Banner character. Finally, on the 120th pull, the game guarantees the six-star banner character. It's worth noting that these numbers do not carry over to the next banner; if you did 119 pulls and the banner renewed, your count resets back to zero.

Another difference in Endfield is that the weapon economy is separate from characters, with a distinct currency — Arsenal Tickets — received whenever you make a pull. Characters with more stars reward players with more Tickets.

On one hand, there's the advantage that every pull yields a character, which helps to have multiple copies of them and perhaps even makes it more economical in the long run if the system becomes more friendly for players who spend little and/or are free-to-play. On the other hand, this differentiation between currencies makes the pull rate considerably more difficult without overt work of patience and resource optimization, hindering one of the most rewarding experiences any gacha title can offer.

Pros