A long time ago a game was a game. You performed one action or small set of actions and everything was tuned around it. Then RPGs started adding side-games, likeChrono Trigger’s jet bike race, and eventually these grew into entire separate activities that could stand on their own, such as Triple Triad fromFinal Fantasy VIIIor theSonic Adventuregames' Chao Garden.Grand Theft Auto 3popularized “do whatever you feel like” in game design, whileMinecraftmade playing your own way while being able to ignore entire chunks of the game its own genre. Nowadays it’s common to see a game likeImmortals: Fenyx Rising, which is a character-based combat platforming puzzle game, throwing as many genres as possible into a blender and hitting puree, but even by those standardsArknights: Endfieldis shaping up to be a whole lot of everything in a well-polished package.
There’s Always Room To Cram In One More Genre
Arknights: Endfieldis a gacha combat platforming open-world base building automation game with puzzle and tower defense elements added in, just in case there wasn’t quite enough to do yet. It’s currently in closed beta, getting feedback for what’s expected to be a 2025 release, and I’ve been playing it obsessively for over a week at the time of this writing. The heart of the game is a four-character action-RPG similar toSecret of Mana, where you control one character from the crew you’ve assembled while the others fight alongside, not quite as effectively, but unquestionably helpful.
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Each character has a basic four-hit combo, with the final strike being an extra-strong attack to finish up the chain, plus a number of special attacks with varying triggers. The first one is dependent on a three-stage bar that fills up as you land hits on the enemy, with each section of the bar allowing you to trigger one battle skill from whichever character seems to best fit the situation. Each character has a status effect tied to their ability, but the first time it lands just makes the enemy vulnerable while the next one applies the status effect. These abilities are there to be used, with no benefit to letting the bar remain full, but it’s generally worth keeping one segment active for the bigger baddies. They tend to break out power attacks, indicated by a red circle of force filling in around them, but hitting the enemy with anyone’s battle skill acts as an interrupt that not only means the goon wasted its time with a useless charge period, but is also vulnerable for a couple of extra hits.
The second special move, the ultimate, takes significantly longer to charge up, but its gauge doesn’t deplete between one encounter and the next. With a four-player party it’s easy enough to have the 1-4 keys trigger their individual battle skills, while the more powerful ultimate is triggered by a longer press on the number key rather than a tap. This kicks off a one-second cinematic flourish unique to the character before they rain down hell onto the battlefield, hitting several enemies at once if they happen to be in range. Both the battle skill and ultimate attacks set the enemy in a state (electrified, knockback, lifted, burn, etc) and this can trigger the opportunity for a third type of special attack, the combo skill, from another character depending on their synergies. Setting up a good team isn’t just choosing a favorite set of characters of the highest ranking, but rather finding ones that feed off each others' abilities to turn every encounter into a massive combo-fest of basic chains, battle skills, dodges, counters and the occasional finisher when the enemy takes enough hits to be staggered.
When In Doubt, Automate. When Not In Doubt, Automate Anyway
Just about everything feeds into the combat system in some way, but there’s a lot of “everything” to take into consideration. While your combat team can be anyone you want, the main characters of the game are the hero of Endfield Industries, the Endministrator, and her (or his if you choose the male version) assistant Perlica. They’re tasked with helping humanity get a foothold on the planet Talos-II, which has turned out to be more hostile and originally expected, and Endmin having a vicous bout of amnesia after being woken from her cryo-sleep too soon isn’t helping. The setting means that, despite all the swords and spears used in combat, the main settlement and its outposts are high-tech affairs with advanced manufacturing capabilities at their disposal. The bulk of the quests for as much of the game as is available in the beta involve cleaning up after a calamity takes a serious toll on the colony and devastating the already-fragile settlements outside of the main base. Beating up the Landbreaker raiders and hostile rock-monsters the aggelos is helpful and all, but the outposts have needs and that means manufacturing.
WhileArknights: Endfieldis by no means as in-depth as a game likeFoundryorSatisfactory, it’s still a lot of fun to see the standard crafting supplemented by automation gameplay. Basic healing components such as the powders made from collectible resources like buckflower (single shot of healing) or citrome (better overall healing than buckflower but slowly over a period of time) can be manufactured by hand, but it’s nicer to have automation make a giant stockpile, especially when planters are unlocked and you can put a system in place to generate them by the hundreds. Outposts also need a supply of items to level up, and while you can generate and deliver them by hand, that seems like a lot of work when it’s much more fun to run power relays to the mining spots scattered across the map, set up drills, auto-transfer the ore back to the primary depot and have everything sort itself out even when the game’s not running.
The upgrade system for outposts is a long-term project which will take hours to complete a single level even when set to auto-delivery, but the reward is being able to update an entire area of the game to not only provide better resources, but also higher-level enemy encounters with better drops. It’s a convoluted cycle of fighting, exploring, automating and upgrading to make fighting rewarding again once you’ve leveled up past what an area had to offer, but for a gacha game, this provides the long-term feedback loop to justify coming back on a daily basis.
There are entire articles that can be written about gacha gaming, where new characters and weapons are dispensed randomly based on how many resources you want to sink into the process, and those resources of course include real actual money. In the beta it’s all in-game currencies only, but eventuallyArknights: Endfieldwill release with the full slate of gacha mechanics intact. For right now I can say I’ve only had to exercise a little patience to get the weapons and characters I want, with plenty of time for each banner (the limited-time period of availability of a character or weapon) to pay off. The odds seem OK to me based on the single other gacha game I’ve played, so I’m going to let others with more experience make the call on whether this is a good rate of payoff or not. What I can say, though, is that it’s weird to have a party with a character I’ve become familiar with through gameplay suddenly show up and introduce himself in the storyline.
At The Mercy Of The Gacha RNG
It’s also worth noting that, like most gacha, drawing for new characters (called Operators) is drawing for cute girls, with a total of three not falling into that categorization – the panda Da Pan, mercenary Wulfgard and teenaged Lifeng. That’s not to deny that the bulk of the characters are fun to play as and have some great design flourishes, but there’s a whole lot of waifu-collecting going on here. The only real diversity comes from everyone having animal traits of some type, generally horns or ears, and even that’s a bit weird because those with animal ears also have human ones. Once you see a character has a total of four ears on their head it’s hard to ignore.
Operators and weapons each come with a star ranking to determine their potential usefulness at a glance, rating between four and six. Just getting a character is nice, of course, but both characters and weapons come with a feature called Potential that adds new upgrades to them, gotten by fusing up to five duplicates together to max out its abilities. For the four-star characters this takes no time at all, seeing as they’re the bulk of those pulled, and five-star operators only take a bit longer. Unlocking all five upgrades of a six-star operator or weapon, though, will be a long-term project. As noted, though,Arknights: Endfieldis intended to be a long-term game, and if it can deliver the content to justify the grind, then the rest is just a matter of patience. It also doesn’t hurt that at the moment, with the beta’s limited character roster of six 6-star and four each 5- and 4-star characters, maxing out everyone is easy and the bonuses to the lower-tier ones mean they can keep up with the six-stars.
Arknights: Endfieldis shaping up to be a whole lot of everything in a well-polished package.
In addition to their usefulness in combat, each operator also has non-combat abilities usable in the base-building aspect of the gameplay. The outposts are more productive with an administrator, while the home-base of the spaceship Dijiang has several rooms where resources can be generated with the speed affected by who’s assigned to it. The only real issue is that output of the ship’s manufacturing tends to be slow, with the grow-room in particular being far less efficient than just quick-traveling to a resource node clearly marked on the map and hand-harvesting the items instead. Still, that’s what being in beta is for, so I’d expect to see those numbers adjusted as the game travels to release.
On top of the base-building, resource gathering, combat optimization and automation gameplay,Arknights: Endfieldalso adds a number of other gameplay styles to break things up even more. Broken panels are fixed by a puzzle game that plays as a fusion of Picross with tetronimo pieces, solved by arranging the pieces so that the correct number of squares are filled in for each row and column. The bases gain an early warning system alerting of attacks and showing the route the invaders will take through the town, and it’s up to Endmin to arrange defensive turrets along the route without going over the maximum number allowed for the settlement’s level of development, and then beat on any that look like they’re getting through. Battle arenas are scattered around the landcape, indicated by a rift hanging in the air, and invasion spots regenerate daily in specific areas but, seeing as they don’t move, can be lined with defensive turrets to help thin the swarm. That’s not to mention all the exploration rewards, side-quests, the farming plot and other activities scattered through the maps.
TheArknights: Endfieldbeta is showing off the start of an excellent action-RPG that’s working to knock off its rough edges in the run-up to release. Its combat system is fast and flashy with a lot of room for experimentation, while the endless gameplay systems supporting it make excellent diversions in their own right. The story still needs tweaking, especially how much everyone loves the Endministrator despite her being out of action for years before the story begins and it being obvious that her assistant Perlica does all the actual work, but switching out different combat teams, automating healing item production, upgrading outposts and home base, searching the many nooks and crannies of the world maps, and all the other activities make for a round of gaming that I’m going to have a hard time cutting myself off from seeing as the beta’s save doesn’t transfer to full release. There’s a huge amount to do to get a planetary colony reeling from disaster back on its feet, and if that involves a couple months of daily gacha gameplay to make it happen, then that’s a price the operators ofArknights: Endfieldare more than willing to pay.
