Arknights is an interesting take on the mobile gacha game where the gameplay is a tower defense instead of being an idle RPG or a slight tactics game. I had an okay time with it, but didn’t stick with the game long enough to see the depth of what it could offer. I was repelled almost immediately by the whole ‘free mobile game’ feeling that permeates everything about it. The endless menus, seemingly infinite number of different currencies to buy, grind and use to upgrade vague stats and skills. It’s too bad, because tower defense games are one of my favorite genres, and this could’ve been neat!
I enjoyed the style of Arknights, the fact that your faction is named ‘Rhodes Island’ is pretty funny, the character design is okay and the whole UI and various interfaces being all military stuff made it a nice change. The gameplay itself is nice as well! You place your units on a map, limited by recharging Deployment Points, and you rotate your characters to make them face the direction you want. There are melee characters that block enemies, ranged attackers, healers and plenty of other types with their skills, costs and strengths. It’s too bad that you get them from random gacha boxes and that there are so many that it becomes a blob of stats and skills.
Otherwise the game follows a pretty standard mobile format where each map has a cutscene beforehand, a few difficulty modes you’ll try over time, star ratings depending on whether you beat the map well or not, and rewards. You have daily login rewards, weekly events, resources, premium subscriptions and various packs you can buy, daiyl and weekly quests, and all that. I just wanted to play a tower defense game where the game is balanced by itself without factoring all that weird economy stuff.
Arknights isn’t bad and my general fatigue with free to play mobile games shouldn’t be the hardest knock of all time against it if you know what you’re getting into (and are fine with it). The art and settings are cool and the gameplay was interesting. I just wish all of that was tied up to another business model.
