Arknights: Endfield praised for factory building but criticised for Genshin-like gacha

In a Pcgamer piece, Tyler C. says he would enjoy Arknights: Endfield more if it stopped imitating Genshin Impact and let players get on with its factory-building systems.

He argues the game borrows heavily from Genshin's open-world, anime gacha formula, but its automation—collecting plants and rocks, remote mining rigs, top-down or third-person placement, power lines and automated turrets—is the part that clicks. Tyler says the factory systems are easy to learn and feel like an evolution of Arknights' mobile, hero-based tower defence roots, with production that quickly becomes satisfying as materials flood in.

That satisfaction is undercut, he writes, by frequent returns to action-RPG missions, drip-fed tutorials, and sprawling gacha-style menus of tasks that encourage grind and spending; the overall experience feels manipulative and exhausting. The piece concludes that Endfield is a gateway to factory building buried beneath gacha mechanics, and that perhaps the author should "finally install Factorio."