Did the PS5 need another all-encompassing live service gacha game? Probably not, no – and so our expectations for Arknights: Endfield prior to release were relatively low.
While we’ve always appreciated its industrial aesthetic, we simply didn’t feel we had enough time in our schedule for another daily grind.
It speaks to the overwhelming quality of this effort from Chinese firm GRYPHLINE that it’s worked its way into our daily rota, then. How long will it remain there? Well, that will depend on its long-term support, but right now we highly recommend this release.
Let’s get the biggest negative out of the way first, though: the narrative – which centres upon the annoyingly named amnesiac, the Endministrator – is a spaghetti of proper nouns and overbearing lore exposition, as all of these games tend to be.
There are some nice flourishes which lean into the ecological impact of your actions – more on that shortly – but you exist primarily for your anime accomplices to fawn over you.
And of course, you’re part of some mythological mystery which the title will spend the next several years drip feeding on its path towards End of Service.
So, while the cutscenes are impeccably animated, it’s not a game we’d currently recommend for its story – although we do like some of the more personal character interactions, and there’s some decent dialogue in there.
No, this is a game that crosses the streams of open world exploration and management strategy to excellent effect – a unique kind of kryptonite for this particular author.
While the fundamentals of Endfield will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s put a few fleeting hours into the likes of Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves, it’s tethered to an automation system which takes props from the likes of Satisfactory.
So, consider for a moment, this scenario: there are plants all over the open world you can pick to add to your inventory. However, collecting said plants takes time, right?
Solution: you can build infrastructure that takes a single source plant, picks its seeds, grows them into more plants, and then stores them in your depot. Run the system and you’ll quickly realise you’ve created a loop that stocks an infinite number of plants in your inventory.
Now, what if you process those plants – in conjunction with a bottling machine – to create a kind of medicinal production facility? Well, perhaps you could sell those goods to a nearby camp in need of a steady supply of first aid.
Do you get where we’re going with this?
Sure, you may have constructed a production line that nets you a steady stream of income, but what are you going to do with all that money? Maybe invest it into the stock market, as demand in different resources ebbs and flows on a daily basis? Okay.
This game scratches so many different itches that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the dopamine is coming from: the increasingly complex infrastructure you’re constructing or the ever-escalating damage output delivered by your army of anime waifus.
The game is complicated, but an outstanding roster of puzzle-like tutorials makes keeping abreast of all its various mechanics surprisingly manageable.
And if you don’t want to get into the weeds of the construction yourself, you can download optimised blueprints made by other players from the Internet.
It’s particularly alarming that we’ve got this deep into our review without even mentioning the moment-to-moment open world exploration – the Genshin Impact part, if you prefer.
But that’s great, too: slick PS5 performance and vibrant high-resolution visuals makes movement look and feel tight, and we love how your cast actually run around with you out on the field like in a proper JRPG, rather than just disappear when you switch between them.
The combat feels meaty, too: it’s simplistic – most characters will issue a sequence of attacks, concluding in a finishing blow – but you have a skill bar at the bottom which fills up, allowing you to trigger the skills of your teammates. And combo attacks, executed when certain battle conditions are met, allow for interesting synergies between squad members.
The Endministrator, for example, will launch their combo skill when another teammate uses theirs. So, it’s interesting to think about how you can combine different teammates for the maximum damage output, and adds an extra wrinkle to the team building aspect.
Of course, getting the characters you want means you will need to succumb to gacha, and Endfield’s pulls feel expensive – even if the game is pretty generous in this launch period at giving you plenty of the currency you need.
Still, the abundance of currencies feels particularly hostile here, with even the premium, paid resources requiring a conversion if you want to use them to pull on characters.
Still, we will acknowledge a couple of positives: character banners will stick around semi-long term, giving you more opportunities to get the units you want.
And signature weapons – separate banners in Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves – can be acquired by investing a non-paid currency which accumulates when you pull on characters. This is all good.
Each unit is bursting with personality too, thanks to some outstanding animation work. We love, for example, how the clumsy Last Rite accidentally lobs her weapons off-screen when you cycle through her poses on the character inspection screen.
But we will say if you’ve tried games like this before and not really gotten on with them, then this won’t change your mind.
Despite the introduction of automation elements, your goals very much stay the same: you grind through various time gates and resources in order to steadily raise the overall ceiling of your team.
But the industrial hook – paired with a genuinely astounding control scheme that makes much of this feel manageable on a bog-standard DualSense – absolutely deserves credit.
Knowing that your factories will continue to crank out materials even when you’re not playing makes logging back on feel like a shotgun slug of dopamine to the face. And that, despite the abundance of similar games already available on the PS5, makes dropping this game from your rota difficult to say the least.
