Arknights: Endfield

Game overview

Arknights: Endfield takes the Arknights name, politely sets the tower-defense homework to the side, and sprints into a slick sci-fi action RPG that’s weirdly in love with industrial logistics. You play as the Endministrator (yes, that’s the title—no, you don’t get dental), dropped onto the dangerous world of Talos-II where exploration, combat, and corporate-grade resource extraction all smash together into one busy, glittering package.

Moment-to-moment, you roam broad zones, pick fights with hostile wildlife and mechanized nightmares, and scoop up materials like a loot-hungry raccoon. Combat is real-time, party-based, and built around swapping between characters to chain abilities and maintain pressure. It’s not pure button-mash chaos, though—the best fights reward planning: positioning, cooldown timing, and element/team synergies matter, especially when enemies start punishing sloppy play.

Then the game’s “Wait, what genre is this?” hook kicks in: base-building. You don’t just craft a sword and call it a day—you build production lines. Power networks, miners, processors, conveyors, and all the little pieces that turn “random rock” into “high-grade widget that upgrades your squad.” When it works, it’s deeply satisfying in the same way cleaning a messy room is satisfying… if the room fought back and required electricity routing.

The catch? Endfield is ambitious to a fault. Tutorials can feel like a firehose, menus can resemble an accountant’s fever dream, and the monetization/gacha layer hangs over progression like a smug little raincloud. Still, if you want an anime sci-fi adventure where you can duel monsters and micromanage an industrial empire, Endfield’s unusual blend has a real bite.

➔ Main points:

• Hybrid action and strategy: real-time fights with swapping, cooldown control, and team synergies.
• Talos-II exploration: wide zones, secrets, materials, and danger around every shiny corner.
• Factory management madness: power lines, conveyors, and production chains that actually matter.
• Progression with a purpose: upgrades tied to what you build, not just what you kill.
• Distinct sci-fi tone: less medieval fantasy, more “corporate survival on a hostile planet.”
• Gacha gravity: roster power and convenience tug hard as the hours pile up.

Full review

Welcome to Talos-II, Please Mind the Radiation

Endfield’s first triumph is vibe. Talos-II doesn’t feel like a generic “open world with grass” showroom; it feels like a place that wants you gone. The landscapes swing between stark industrial ruins, alien wilderness, and research-facility creepiness—the kind of scenery where you half-expect the local flora to file a complaint against your existence. You’re not here for a picnic. You’re here because someone, somewhere, decided “resource extraction” is a personality trait, and you’re the lucky Endministrator holding the clipboard.

Story-wise, Endfield leans into sci-fi mystery and organizational intrigue: factions, experiments, ancient systems, and that lingering sense that the planet has a long memory and a short temper. The narrative delivery can be uneven—sometimes it’s moody and compelling, sometimes it’s a jargon smoothie that dares you to stay awake. Still, it generally succeeds at making you curious about what happened on Talos-II and why your job description sounds like it was written by an apocalyptic HR department.

Exploration is structured to feed both adventure and industry. You’re constantly nudged to poke at points of interest, clear enemy camps, and harvest materials. The best part is that scavenging rarely feels pointless: those ores and components aren’t just “numbers go up,” they’re the bones of your future base expansion. The world design encourages loops—go out, gather, survive, come back smarter, build bigger, then go out again with better tools and a little more confidence.

Character presentation is stylish, with clean anime designs and a strong sense of identity in silhouettes and animations. The cast sells the “elite operator” fantasy, even when the writing occasionally trips over its own lore. But when Endfield is clicking, it makes you feel like the leader of a capable crew carving stability out of a planet that actively resents being organized. And honestly, that’s a mood.

Button Ballet and Tactical Spite

Combat is where Endfield tries to prove it’s not just “another pretty gacha action game,” and—most of the time—it pulls it off. You control a party and swap between characters to maintain momentum, layer effects, and respond to enemy patterns. Basic attacks feel snappy, abilities have satisfying impact, and movement has that slick “anime action figure came to life” energy. When you’re rotating skills properly, battles flow like a choreographed brawl where everyone knows their marks and the monsters are the unpaid extras.

But here’s the secret sauce: Endfield doesn’t want you to win by mashing harder. It wants you to win by being smarter. Cooldown timing, enemy stagger windows, positioning, and team composition all matter more than the game initially admits. Early encounters can feel breezy, but as enemies start gaining nasty habits—area denial, heavy hits, shields, disruptive effects—you’re forced to engage with the toolkit. The game gets better the moment you stop treating swaps as “pick my favorite” and start treating them as tactical routing: apply pressure, trigger synergy, pivot to support, punish openings.

Enemy design is a mixed bag in the best way: some foes are straightforward and exist to be dunked on for resources (thank you for your service, random robot crab), while others are mini skill-checks that demand you respect their patterns. Bosses, in particular, can be genuinely tense, especially when the arena design adds hazards or forces movement discipline. The sense of escalation is real—Endfield eventually asks you to play like you mean it.

Where it stumbles is readability during chaos and the occasional combat “same-ness” in extended sessions. When particle effects and UI indicators pile up, clarity can wobble. And because the game is also juggling progression incentives, you’ll sometimes feel the grind nudging you back into familiar routines. Still, the core is strong: combat feels purposeful, and the party-swapping rhythm gives it an identity that’s sharper than most gacha contemporaries.

Factorycore Fantasia: Conveyors, Power Lines, and Glorious Overengineering

Now for the part where Endfield looks you in the eyes and says, “Congratulations, hero. Here’s your sword. Also, here’s a spreadsheet.” The base-building and industrial management layer is Endfield’s signature move, and it’s either going to become your new obsession or your personal villain origin story.

You gather raw materials out in the field, then funnel them into a production ecosystem you build yourself—generators to provide power, extractors to pull resources, processors to refine them, and conveyors to route everything like you’re designing a theme park for minerals. There’s a specific kind of joy in watching an efficient production chain run cleanly. It’s the same dopamine hit as organizing cables behind a TV, except the cables are glowing and the TV is a hostile planet.

The brilliance is how tightly this system ties into progression. Your base isn’t a decorative side activity; it’s a force multiplier. Better production means better upgrades, better tools, smoother resource flow, and fewer moments where you’re stuck begging the universe for one more rare component. You start thinking like a logistics gremlin: “If I move this processor here, I can shorten the conveyor, reduce bottlenecks, and—oh no—I’m having fun.”

The downside is that Endfield sometimes overdoes the complexity. The UI can feel busy, tutorials can arrive like a never-ending parade of pop-ups, and small inefficiencies can spiral into “why is nothing working?” frustration. When it’s intuitive, it’s incredible. When it’s not, it’s like trying to assemble furniture with instructions written by a poet.

Still, this is what makes Endfield stand out. Plenty of games let you fight monsters. Endfield lets you fight monsters so you can go home and build a factory that will help you fight more monsters, more efficiently. That loop is weird, specific, and wildly memorable.

Final Verdict

*Arknights: Endfield* is an ambitious genre smoothie: action RPG exploration poured over strategic combat and topped with a big industrial-management cherry. When it works, it feels like nothing else in the space—**a stylish sci-fi adventure where your base is more than décor**, and where progression is as much about engineering smart systems as it is about swinging a weapon.

But Endfield also has the classic “too many ideas, not enough breathing room” problem. It can drown you in tutorials, bury key features under dense menus, and occasionally turn the fun into friction when the grind ramps up. And then there’s monetization: the gacha layer and shop structure loom over the experience, and launch-era trust problems around transactions and microtransaction confusion left a bruise on the game’s reputation. Even if the core gameplay is strong, players don’t forget when a store feels like it’s trying to speedrun bad vibes.

So who is Endfield for? If you want a clean, purely narrative action RPG, this will feel like being handed a riveting novel… glued to a factory manual. But if the idea of fighting through hostile zones to feed a growing production empire sounds like your kind of beautifully unhinged, Endfield delivers a distinct hook that separates it from the usual “roam, fight, roll for characters” crowd.

My verdict: a bold, often excellent hybrid with real personality—held back by UI overload, pacing bumps, and monetization baggage. If Hypergryph keeps polishing the rough edges, Endfield could become a standout long-hauler. Right now, it’s already a fascinating one—just don’t be surprised if you come for the anime combat and stay because you accidentally became a conveyor-belt perfectionist.

Ready to enter the world of Arknights: Endfield? Click here to play now!

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Review summary

1. Welcome to Talos-II, Please Mind the Radiation
2. Button Ballet and Tactical Spite
3. Factorycore Fantasia: Conveyors, Power Lines, and Glorious Overengineering
4. Final Verdict