Arknights: Endfield beta impressions – Xenoblade Chronicles meets Factorio

Originally published on January 28, 2025.

Talos 2 is the second moon of a gas giant — a beautiful world rich in resources that could be home to billions of people. Unfortunately, the moon seems to be doomed. A maelstrom of energy has appeared over a nearby power planet full of volatile resources and the unfolding crisis might well spell disaster for an entire region of Talos 2. But I really can’t deal with such minor problems right now, because my automated factory isn’t producing enough batteries to properly supply one of my outposts. That’s the real crisis here. The factory must grow.

Hypergryph’s upcoming open-world RPG Arknights: Endfield is one of a kind. It fuses mechanics from titles such as Xenoblade Chronicles and Genshin Impact with base-building and automation gameplay straight out of Factorio or Satisfactory. Sprinkle a little Death Stranding into the mix as well and you’ve got the most unique gacha game I’ve ever laid eyes upon.

Arknights: Endfield starts out normal enough. You get to choose between your male or female protagonist who turns out to be an über-powerful legendary figure admired by many and feared by few, but unfortunately is an amnesiac and can’t remember how to do any of that cool stuff.

NPCs glazing the protagonist in a gacha game is nothing new. Wuthering Waves’ Rover is practically the main character of a harem anime at this point. In Endfield, only one character clearly crushes on the Endministrator so far, but literally everyone you meet tells you how powerful and legendary you are. I’d be fine with that, if I could imagine the Endmin in that role. However, the protagonist doesn’t seem particularly strong or smart throughout the entire first chapter. In fact, the comically arrogant antagonist had like three chances to kill me, but let me stay alive every time while mocking me — and I can’t blame them for the mocking.

Even when the protagonist has cool moments, the plot immediately negates them with the villain one-upping them. At the end of the first chapter, the power of friendship and a noble sacrifice are what saves the day, with the sacrifice not even being permanent.

Endfield has a very intriguing, believable world for the most part — but the story told at the start of the game simply is not very gripping. I can imagine that the Endmin regaining their memories, as is the stated goal at this point in the story, will be a catalyst for more development.

It doesn’t help that most of the companions we meet along the way are way too reasonable and well-adjusted to society. The Endmin obviously had a fantastic eye for personnel, because the people working at Endfield Industries are top-notch. That’s great, but doesn’t make for engaging story-telling or character development.

What you can’t take away from Endfield is the quality of its presentation. There are occasional black screens with text descriptions, but dialogs feature varied camera cuts, lots of poses and gestures from the characters, and a good amount of voice acting. There are plenty of stunning cutscenes as well to illustrate key parts of the story. 

Visually, Arknights: Endfield really feels like a “next-gen” gacha game — and, shockingly, it’s so well polished that I can count the number of bugs I’ve encountered on one hand. Endfield is the first gacha game that can go toe-to-toe with the HoYoverse titles in terms of polish and overall production quality.

Gameplay, in general, can be divided into three parts: exploration, combat, and base-building.

Combat is the weakest part of the trio. I’d describe it as somewhat MMO-like — a bit clunky, static, potentially repetitive. In contrast to most other gachas, which feature only one active character from your party on the field at any given time, Endfield has your four-person group exploring and fighting at the same time. I love this, because I get to see all of my characters, though it has the unfortunate side-effects of causing a bit of clutter during battle and making stealthy sections feel a little ridiculous (as your companions can just waltz by enemies while your active character stays hidden).

Characters have a basic attack, an active skill, a combo skill, and an ultimate at their disposal. The combo skills are the most interesting mechanic, as they have specific trigger conditions, making team-building a very fun experience and combat overall a very strategic activity. While you wait for skill points (you have three of those) to regenerate and cooldowns to expire, you’ll mostly spam that basic attack, hoping you can chain it long enough to get a finisher in, which increases the enemy’s stagger rating and stuns them. Dodging interrupts the chain, so stunning enemies is often a frustrating process and feels clunky. There are elemental reactions and status effects to consider as well. Overall, I enjoyed my time in combat, but I fear that the system could grow a little repetitive over time.

Arknights: Endfield’s greatest strength are the other two areas: exploration and base-building. As you traverse the map (you can jump and have unlimited sprint, but you can’t climb or swim), you find the usual puzzles, treasure chests, and enemies. However, you’ll also establish the position of ores and rare plants or find abandoned industrial areas. Starting at your factory, you can build power lines across the entire map, establish mining outposts and power up those wrecked buildings to gain additional rewards. You can even build a network of ziplines to get around locations faster. Over time, you really leave your mark on the map and make it your own, manifesting your overall progress.

Your factory is the heart of everything you do. All those resources you collect can be turned into more advanced resources or consumables here — things like healing items are produced here. The game also allows you to establish outposts in sub-regions, which you need to supply with a steady stream of goods that need to be produced. Finally, the base-building is fully linked with the character progression. Instead of farming for gear in domains, you need to establish production lines and build the necessary parts to make the equipment yourself.

This intertwining of exploration, factory gameplay, and combat/character progression is what’s captivated me most about Arknights: Endfield.

And here’s the thing: While Endfield does not reach the complexity of a pure automation game, it gets shockingly close. It gets much more complex and deep than I would have thought possible for a gacha game. It’s super well tutorialized and intuitive as well — plus, there is a top-down placement mode, so you can even play from a traditional base-building perspective.

Another aspect I really enjoyed was the spaceship. You can expand this over time, adding new workshops and labs to produce stuff like character progression materials and XP items. What’s special about it is that you can find all of your characters working or roaming around here. They’ll react to you being nearby, coming over for a chat. You can offer and receive gifts from them here (and you buy the gifts using a currency gained by supplying your outposts, closing another gameplay loop), raising their trust in you. Higher trust, in turn, boosts their stats in combat.

Naturally, this wouldn’t be a true Arknights game without a tower defense mode. You can research and construct new towers using your factory to defend outposts from raids.

Arknights: Endfield is chock-full of diverse content that sets it apart from other gacha games, comes with impeccable presentation and great character designs, and its combination of traditional open-world RPG gameplay with automation mechanics is very satisfying. While the combat isn’t especially engrossing and the story falls fairly flat so far, the current closed beta made Endfield a game I won’t want to miss out on.

Impressions are based on the PC version of the game.