As any game grows in popularity, it's only natural for a developer to question how they can expand it and keep the hype train going. After over six years of their debut title being one of the most popular gacha games on the market, Hypergryph has chosen to expand the Arknights universe to a new frontier with the spinoff, Arknights Endfield. This title takes place on a different planet in the far-off future after the original Arknights and transitions the IP from a Tower-Defense RPG to an Action-RPG.
While the title has taken a long time to come out, it has officially entered its second beta and is allowing players to engage with a completely reworked opening sequence in order to properly throw them into the world and gameplay loop of Endfield. With 23 wonderful characters to play as currently and several areas to explore, this is the most in-depth taste of the Arknights Endfield experience yet.
Simple Yet Deep Combat
Combat in Endfield consists of repeatedly pressing the attack button while waiting for your more powerful skills to charge up and activate them. On a surface level, this combat does not have much depth, but there are a few mechanics that help keep battles engaging.
These mechanics range from typical Action game tropes, such as a perfect dodge and being able to stagger enemies with repeated combos, to more unique mechanics, being able to interrupt enemy attacks by casting one of your skills on them before they charge up and ultimate attacks, which charge upon repeated use of skills.
The biggest factor that helps the combat of Endfield stand out from other Action-RPG gachas is the character's party. Many similar games only have a single character on the field at a time, compared to Endfield, which has your entire party of four attacking enemies at the same time, while also allowing the player to instantly switch which one of them the player is controlling with only a single button press. There's even a team assist attack mechanic, which activates after a successful combo.
Despite its simple combat, Arknights Endfield does a good job at making sure that each of its 23 playable characters plays differently from each other. A character like Akekuri could specialize in fast but weak attacks at a close range, while someone like Perlica could do high damage and attack from a range, but at the cost of her combat speed being much slower than others.
This uniqueness extends to the character's skills as well. While a large number of the cast simply perform a powerful attack when their skill is activated, there are many characters who do something truly interesting. This can range from tossing a spear into the ground in order to call it to your location later, damaging all enemies in its path, to giving your attacks an elemental buff that'll inflict a status effect on enemies after a few combos.
Shockingly, this strive to make the characters play differently from each other also extended to some mechanics one would expect to be static across the roster, such as Gilberta having a slower dodge than the other characters on the team.
One character that was a pleasant surprise in terms of how they played was Snowshine, who was a character with slow close-ranged attacks but compensated for this weakness by having a skill that countered enemy attacks and an assist strike that healed allies. Having the opportunity to play as her truly showed me how much potential the battle system in Arknights Endfield truly has. An impressive amount of effort has been put into the combat design of each of Endfield's characters and that deserves praise.
An impressive amount of effort has been put into the combat design of each of Endfield's characters and that deserves praise.
As for the difficulty of the combat that players will be taking advantage of these mechanics in, it is currently hard to judge how difficult Endfield will be, as the level cap in the Beat was 40, and gachas typically only show their true difficulty at max level. Of the content currently in the Beta, however, not many battles truly brought me close to death; they did require me to use several healing items to recover between fights, though, something which rarely happens for this style of game.
Now, as for how the player will be enhancing their characters to match the combat and grow beyond needing to heal, the game features a typical gacha progression system of feeding your characters EXP items so they can level up, and then increasing their max level via gathering specific materials to ascend the character.
The game also gives a small amount of experience during regular combat encounters. While this EXP gain is much, much slower than that gained from EXP materials, it still appears to have its use, as during the beta, characters will be able to level up multiple times before they have a large amount of EXP materials.
An Entire Factory Construction System
Now, while there's still plenty of grinding for materials via battles, Arknights Endfield features an incredibly unique gameplay system known as AIC Factory Building. This system allows players to build systems that let them automatically develop resources and build other structures.
Transitioning from gathering ore in the field one by one to having a machine that can automatically create it for you over the course of a few seconds is incredibly satisfying. Players will also be able to create structures throughout the world, such as zip lines to quickly cross areas of the map that have already been added to their power grid.
While I wasn't able to see the full extent of the building mechanics during my time with Beta Test II, it was immediately clear that this is a complex and large part of the game. For that reason, it's reassuring to know that players will be able to share their factory blueprints with each other via the social features and even be able to occasionally use another player's structure.
Hopefully, this blueprint system will allow players who are either beginners or inexperienced with factory-building games to experience the factory system without worrying about it bringing down their Endfield experience.
Masterfully Crafted Level Design
One area where Arknights Endfield blows its contemporaries out of the water is its area design. While many recent games in this genre have chosen to either attempt a full open world or stick to small areas, Endfield instead strikes a balance by having multiple large and self-contained open zones that the player can explore and play around in.
What makes the zones in Endfield stand out from other similar games is a sense of actual terrain in the areas you explore. Many gacha RPGs have been opting for mostly flat areas. Endfield, in comparison, has plenty of slopes to scale and crevasses to jump down as the player searches for secrets.
There was one moment in the early point of the beta that truly made me appreciate the level design of Endfield, which was when I found an area with enemies guarding a treasure chest, only to then notice that the crates in this area were just high enough that the player could jump on top of them. This curiosity was then rewarded with finding a second treasure chest!
Throughout the beta, there will be multiple moments like this that will thrill players with a penchant for exploring and noticing oddities in an area's design.
Areas in this game are also filled with several sidequests and activities that the player can participate in for extra materials and experience. These can range from simple things, such as fighting several waves of strong enemies, to racing against NPCs in a foot race across the map.
While the level design in Endfield deserves high praise, the game does have an issue with how much it railroads players through these areas during story missions. Waypoints are constant, appearing every few feet to ensure that the player doesn't diverge from the intended path. These waypoints can take a lot of the fun out of the level design as they make areas feel like a tunnel instead of an open field during the story.
Well-Crafted Character Designs
Now, of course, a gacha game can live or die on its character designs. Luckily, Hypergryph had many years of practice and the designs of Arknights Endfield's current roster of characters all look great so far. There's a wide variety of ears and tails on display in the roster. From doggies to demonic horns, Endfield is hitting all bases.
The Homogenization of the Gacha Medium
Let us now take a moment to talk about some of the finer details of the Arknights Endfield experience and how it relates to other famous gacha games and the homogenization of the gacha medium.
The influence that MiHoYo's published games, like Genshin Impact, had on this title is almost undeniable when one examines the UI. Arknights Endfield features a circular menu that can be brought up at any time to quickly move to other menus, such as their party set-up, enhancement screen, and of course, the gacha and events menu.
While the gacha menu itself was not available to see in the Beta Test, the event menu was. Here, it became clear that the title would run off a similar system to other gachas, as there were various summon tickets, daily log-in rewards, and banner advertisements on full display.
This inspiration goes far beyond simple UI elements as well as various other details such as battle vfx, a text message system where both the characters you pulled in the gacha and quest NPCs speak to you, and even the way dialogue options are presented in cutscenes resemble that of gacha giants.
Now, just because Arknights Endfield has these elements does not mean they were taken directly from MiHoYo games. This is more a side effect of the homogenization of the gacha medium as a whole. Many other games, such as Blue Archive, Infinity Nikki, and more, have been using these elements as well.
Once 3D gacha games became the norm, they have nearly all stuck to this style. Arknights Endfield is just a particularly jarring example of this, as the original Arknights had a unique visual style and gameplay structure, which helped it stand out from its peers. While Endfield certainly has high quality, one has to wonder if that will be enough to make it last amongst the ever-growing crowd of similar products.
Now, as for an element of Endfield that's similar to other gachas, but in a strange way, the game has a unique way of portraying its protagonist. This character, referred to as the Endministrator, can of course be male or female as they're the player surrogate. Unlike many other player surrogates, though, the Enministrator has full dialogue during cutscenes and successfully feels like a character in their own right.
Despite the early establishment of the Endministrator being their own character, however, Perlica still takes up the role of being a mouthpiece for the player and takes charge during most conversations during the plot of the game. It's a odd middle ground that feels like the result of the prologue being reworked during development.
Despite this strangeness, Arknights Endfield's full release date is still unknown after all this time, earning the game the nickname of “Whenfield” online. This beta has shown that Hypergryph has made tremendous strides during the development of this title, though. The combat may be simple, but each character and exploration zone has a world of depth and the gameplay is sure to keep players engaged throughout the game's runtime. Fans of the Arknights IP and action-RPG gachas in general are almost guaranteed to be satisfied with this title when Arknights Endfield releases on PlayStation 5, Android, IOS and PC in 2026.