Arknights: Endfield review: sci-fi base-building can't help this gacha stand out

Base-building and brainy sci-fi only elevate familiar gacha tropes so much

In a crowded gacha landscape, Arknights: Endfield carves its place with high-tech space drills. Out Jan. 22 for Android, iOS, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC, the game blends action RPG elements with base-building mechanics, which you don’t often see in the gacha space. While other games in the genre also explore concepts like aliens or space travel, Endfield's approach to sci-fi is more in-depth, and gets into heady topics, at points alluding to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous line: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Endfield features enormous alien structures falling from the sky, destroying state-of-the-art facilities, and battle scenes where a small anime girl fights aliens by summoning giant turrets before teaming up with other anime girls to face a giant god-like entity. Based on the universe introduced by the mobile tower defense RPG Arknights, Endfield presents a hard sci-fi setting; instead of dragons, magic, and gods, it has space stations, alien ore, and an all-powerful company administrator — or in Endfield's lexicon, the "Endministrator," your primary player character.

Endfield’s fantasy is of technological positivism. As Endfield’s initial missions unfolded, I learned how to create ziplines so I could quickly traverse the terrain and reach my destinations. Before I could actually start fighting Landbreakers (humanoid enemies who only care about "raiding and looting," according to the characters in the game), I had to build electric pylons, connecting them with wires for electricity to flow and open doors. I built a shredding unit to turn raw Originium ore into powder, and a refining unit to make Origocrust of the same ore. The physical and chemical processes are characters in this story as much as the Endministrator is. Both the story and the mechanics are structured around the general belief in technology's potential to solve problems of any kind.

The Endministrator is the head of the Endfield Industries, and despite looking like a regular human, the narrative gradually drops hints of their significance. They have a minimally explained connection to Originium, giving them the capacity to sense the substance and even repair devices by manipulating Originium that exists within them. In most scenes where they construct a new device, it appears as though the Endministrator is performing some kind of magic. They’re also behind much of the technology employed by Endfield Industries. The Endministrator is an Originium-bender, a master builder and designer, regardless of how cheesy their official title sounds.

From the Endministrator role to the overall application of Originium, Arknights: Endfield celebrates the power of technology. It aims to make you feel excited about machines, factories, and space exploration — a fervor that seems to excuse the fact that societal progress and technological development often come with a heavy ecological cost. The characters recognize that mining Originium harms the planet, but as they put it, "our lives depend on it."

Arknights: Endfield provides a rich soil for discussions about technology, posing moral questions about if it’s worth dooming the future to save the present. Smooth action-based combat and beautiful models help sell that narrative, too. The problem is that Endfield struggles to find a common ground between the goals of its thought-provoking story and the reality of its gacha structure.

It didn't take long for Endfield's colors to fade. Its focus shifts from creating tech to using one of many currencies to upgrade your weapons and armor. The character progression system boils down to a familiar structure of spending a currency to reach the initial level cap, then raising that cap by using specific materials to unlock the character's next rank. To obtain new characters, you need to spend pulls in the seasonal or fixed banners. I’ve done this a million times before. You probably have too.

While I went with low expectations for Endfield’s gacha element, I found myself wishing that the base-building and the crafting system were more crucial to the central narrative. While definitely present and certainly complex, they're just more intricate iterations of systems from other games. Replace machines and production lines with NPCs who take materials and craft items in their shops, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The mining devices are the equivalent of the quick gathering missions I sent my characters on in Genshin Impact. Ziplines became useless when I unlocked the fast travel function, and building structures like electric pylons turned into little more than pieces of a puzzle meant to progress the campaign.

It begs the question whether the decision to follow these design conventions is driven by the desire to please a familiarized audience. Anyone who has played a bit of any other of the major gachas available today can rapidly identify the elements in common present in Endfield. However, the base-building elements suggest at least some level of desire to make it stand out and give it a distinct identity — a creative decision that doesn't come without risks.

Arknights: Endfield is no doubt an original entry into a crowded field, especially in a moment when new gacha titles surrender to ever-popular riffs on high fantasy or urban fantasy formulas. It delivers an engaging sci-fi universe with mysteries that can easily make one feel like they’re ten pages deep into the Destiny 2 wiki. The base-building mechanics offer a fresh touch, too. Even so, the creative potency represented by these ideas fades away, covered by shadows cast by the titans that populate the scene.

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Arknights: Endfield will be released Jan. 22 on Android, iOS, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Gryphline. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.