Been playing a lot of Arknights Endfield since it came out last week.
The game's an odd beast.
Visually it's absolutely stunning. Both in terms of artstyle itself and just sheer quality. Possibly one of the best looking anime games on the market right now.
The factory is fun (it's kind of more on the Zachtronics side of things, since you have limited space and materials and basically have to optimize your output around that instead of just expanding infinitely everywhere). It also interacts with the other gameplay systems in nice way. You produce gear with your factory. You need to manually create a power network through the maps to power your mining equipment, lay ziplines to create your own fast travel networks, build towers that can help you fight strong enemies and otherstuff.
Exploration in general is very strong. There is no climbing, gliding and swimming so it's a refreshingly different experience from something like Genshin. The level design makes full use of those limitations.
Combat is ok. I'll need to play around with more teams to get a better feeling. Boss fights are really well designed.
Now for the negatives. The game makes a shockingly bad first impression.
The writing is really bad. Shockingly bad. I always heard that Arknights has a really good story but never got into that, so my expectations for this were quite high. Suffice to say it was quite a let down. Among the big gachas I play or tried in the past (Genshin, Star Rail, Zenless, Wuthering Waves) this has far worse writing than any of the Hoyo games and might only be around WuWa 1.0 level. It might be even worse in some aspects (never would I have thought that possible but here we are), but it's also better in others. There are some plot and lore threads that could get interesting, but the game has given me no reason to trust them on that front.
The game has the worst tutorialization I've ever seen. There are so many tutorials that constantly interrupt everything. And they use way too many words to tell you nothing much. And they are incredibly bad at actually teaching you on top of it. You learn nothing when single click is guided. They even guide you to close a menu every single time. I completely checked out when they spent like 10 tutorial windows to tell you how to connect a belt from an output port of the factory to an input port of a machine. And every mandatory factory tutorial retutorializes the complete basics. I know how to set an output port to a specific material game, you don't need to give me the same guided tutorial for it every single time!
And then the gacha system is a convoluted clusterfuck with more dark patterns then all of the current mainstream big gachas combined and is fairly slow at giving out its premium currency (though there should be a lot in the game overall).
It takes literally hours before enough subsystems have opened up and the game lets you off the leash when it becomes actually fun and the story only gets somewhat average towards the end of the first chapter (which is most of the game).
The barrier of entry is truly brutal and while I'm enjoying myself quite a bit right now, I fully understand if people never make it that far, lol.
And now for something shorter, I'm playing through Genshin's annual Lantern Rite and its delightful as usual. Just very very good all around and I cannot wait for the final part of the story opening up in 2 days.
