Arknights is a game that’s been quite consistently popular and well-known, especially for the more strategic crowd. After all, the game is free to play and has been having a lot of good word of mouth over the course of its service.
As the player might be able to tell, this gacha game is different from the others that are on the market. Its tower defense gameplay piques a lot of interest, and the game’s unique aesthetics/characters keep the player in.
However, some still might be right to wonder if the game is worth the player’s time as there are just so many gacha games out there these days, but there are a lot of amazing features that make Arknights worth playing in 2024. First, it’s a game that values strategy and provides players a multitude of ways to tackle each stage. Also, it’s a game that knows what it is and continues to put out content that satisfies its core player-base without being overly convoluted with additional systems and mechanics. In addition, the game’s visuals, music, and story all work together well to be a very cohesive and polished whole that is worth anyone that enjoys anime-style games.
Is Arknights a Good Fit For You?
For prospective players that have no idea how Arknights plays, players put together a team of 12 units of differing abilities and passives to deploy in stages. The concept is as with any tower defense game – deploy your characters in a way that lets no enemies through into your base (the blue cubes). When all of the enemies are destroyed, players complete the stage.
As good as Arknights might be, however, there are some things that some players should know before diving in. Therefore, in this article, we’ll be taking an objective view of Arknights and the things it does well and not too well.
| What a Player Might Like About Arknights | What Might Put Players Off About Arknights |
|---|---|
| – Players that enjoy real strategy (strategy and timing playing a more important role than stats) and having multiple ways to complete stages are going to have a blast with Arknights. There is a lot of replayability to try out different team combinations and characters. – Not only does it do tower defense well, but it introduces a lot of different mechanics and twists that keep the gameplay for veterans of the genre. – The aesthetics, style, and themes of Arknights are well thought out. As a result, it creates a natural curiosity about the world and the characters themselves. – The 2D, along with the 3D art and models, is done with care and polish. The game rarely shows any jaggedness or any visual imperfections. – The UI is well-designed, responsive, and intuitive to use. Nothing feels confusing to get to, nor does it feel cramped in any way (despite being made for mobile). – Skins are really well designed and easily obtainable through free-to-play means. Having skin sometimes makes the difference between building a character and not building one (because they look so good). – There’s little to no power creep to speak of. Characters introduced to the game are usually new archetypes with different concepts and mechanics – there’s never a character that’s outright better than past characters. – 3 – 4 star characters are all useful and actually recommended to build first since they take the least amount of resources to build and max. All of the content can be completed with low rarity units. – Decorating and adding furniture to the base is fun and is a nice break from the game. – The gameplay is easy to understand but later on becomes quite difficult to master. Especially with late-game mechanics, players will have to think carefully about using their operators to the fullest potential in each stage. | – Tower defense games might not be appealing to some players. – The gameplay can be a bit slow initially because it’s mostly watching waves of enemies come towards your characters. However, the gameplay does get quite involved and hectic later on. – The game requires a player’s full focus. Therefore, it’s hard to do anything else while the game is going on. Players will find it hard to progress in the game and multi-task. – While the game isn’t exactly generous (there’s going to be quite a bit of grinding to do for resources and currency), it still has systems in place to give players a lot of chances to pull and get lucky to try to obtain their waifu or husbandos whether they spend money or not. – There’s no sort of PVP in the game or competitive modes with other players. This is more of a neutral point as this can be viewed as either good or bad depending on the player. – No cooperative modes or ways to play with friends. You can only use your friend’s support characters, which isn’t recommended anyway because players can only auto stages that they 3 stars by their own teams. – Base-building feature of the game requires too much micromanagement at times. – Gacha rates are not the best but not the worst either. Again, the game has a few systems in-game to offset this. For example, players have a guaranteed chance to pull a 5-star or greater character within their 10 rolls of any new banner. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to do those rolls on every banner that comes. – Some stamina bottlenecks later on in the game. Meaning players won’t play as much as they want once they start getting to the later parts of the game. – The in-game sprites and characters are very stylized. Players will either like the style, or they don’t. – While there is a lot of story and lore in the game that many people enjoy reading, for the impatient (like myself), they’re going to likely skip a lot of it due to the way it’s presented. It would have been nice to have been fed the story while playing through stages. Not before and after the stages. |
Is Arknights Free-to-Play Friendly?
Arknights is definitely free-to-play friendly since all of the events and content in the game can be completed with the lowest rarity units. The game also frequently introduces units that players can get for free through events and just by going through the game.
Though what’s the fun in using the lowest rarity units? Free players can easily 6-stars from the recruit feature and save up for the characters they really want by collecting enough currency. For more information about the rates, systems in the game, and the full analysis of what makes Arknights free-to-play friendly, click here to read!
Arknights is like any other good gacha and rewards players for being in the game and logging in daily as they will have more chances to get the characters they want. In addition, efficient use of Sanity (stamina, to play the game) is important in gathering the necessary resources to upgrade the player’s characters.
How is the Arknights Community?
The Arknights community is large enough that there’s always going to be some sort of new content available for it every day. The game has garnered many fans and people, creating all sorts of different content for Arknights.
One of the things that are quite helpful about the Arknights community is that they always post different ways to complete stages. Therefore, if any player is having difficulties, it takes a quick YouTube or Google to find the best character combinations or clever ways to complete the challenge or stage.
These days, developer streams are becoming more and more common as players and the company behind the game want to have a more direct line of communication with each other.
Arknights will have special streams once in a while for big events such as game anniversaries and birthdays, but it isn’t as often as some players work like. For comparison, gacha games like Epic Seven (click to see the full in-depth review about Epic Seven and if it’s worth it to try it in 2024) have weekly streams to show off either new characters or content that’s about to be released.
What is the Endgame in Arknights?
Once players complete all the content and obtain all of the one-time rewards, some might wonder if there’s anything left to do in Arknights after maxing out characters.
The Endgame in Arknights is all about creating your own challenges in the form of Contingency Contracts. In a nutshell, it’s a challenge mode that requires players to know their team’s strengths and weaknesses and choose restrictions that don’t affect their team strategy much. By far, this is the most difficult content in the game.
Players might notice that once chapter 2-10 is cleared, it opens up a game mode called Contingency Contract (C.C for short). C.C stages can be challenging to clear. That’s why they don’t consume any in-game Sanity (Stamina).
In C.C stages, there is a permanent C.C. (Fixed Site) and another that is rotated and changed daily (Rotating Site). For any one of the stages, players can choose certain “contracts” that will alter gameplay by either buffing enemies, debuffing the player’s team, and/or imposing various limitations. Again, these restrictions and limitations are based upon the player’s choices.
The more contracts the player chooses, the higher difficulty or Risk attained by the player, which increases the rating of the stage. Players will need to balance the difficulty of the stage with the number of contracts selected. Completing a stage with a certain amount of risk will unlock the next contracts available.
Arknights Verdict
In conclusion, Arknights is one of the games that really livens up the gacha market as it introduces many new concepts that veteran gacha players don’t expect. The game is deep and complex without feeling too convoluted in different systems and still simple enough for a new player to grasp quickly.
Although this type of game won’t appeal to everyone at first glance, it’s recommended that anyone that enjoys strategic gameplay and a well-built world and themes give the game a try.