Gaming: Maybe I Should Just Buy Factorio? I'd Like Arknights: Endfield A...

I'm begging anime gacha games to try something new. The chokehold Genshin Impact has on the genre is so obvious that anytime a new one shows up at The Game Awards I force my friends to guess if Hoyoverse made it or not. I've played a lot of them and I can barely tell anymore.

There's nothing wrong with Genshin Impact, but I only need so many open world action RPGs where you meet anime characters you can collect like Pokémon, and most of the copycats don't have anything else going on.

Arknights: Endfield, however, does have something else going on: surprisingly robust factory building. I can't name another gacha game where you mine raw materials and process them in a maze of conveyor belts. Factorio always looked like a game I'd never click with, but Endfield has turned me into the kind of person who can spend hours reorganizing their base just to make it slightly more efficient.

The problem now is that I like the factory building so much that I'm disappointed when Endfield interrupts it to make me play more of its sad sci-fi Genshin Impact-style adventure with characters that make me want to turn the sound off.

Evil, corruption-spreading rocks have appeared on the planet and everyone is relying on your character, the Endministrator, to solve it. Amusingly, they have amnesia so it takes a few hours before you realize the disturbing truth that you're in charge of a corporation that exists to colonize planets and drain them of their resources.

I can deal with that, I just need Endfield's cloying cast of Endministrator-obsessed anime characters to be quiet and let me build. Endfield's main storyline is written as if it's worried you'll turn it off if someone doesn't remind you that you're the only one in the world who knows how to fight rock monsters with a team of four characters and their special abilities. I'd be surprised if that's true, because it's really not that complicated. Much like Genshin Impact, you basically spam skills at spongey enemies and dodge out of their attacks until they die. Your team can set up combos by debuffing enemies with different elements, but, at least for the story missions, you don't really need to do all that to get by.

I'd forgive Endfield for borrowing so much from Genshin Impact if it at least let me do more of the factory building before dragging me back into the most forgettable anime episode ever. What's worse is that even when it does, it's all a drip feed of tutorials for concepts it taught you no less than 15

Source: PC Gamer