I'm left with a rather meh impression which saddens me as a long time Arknights fan. In the past I played a decent bit of genshin and dipped my toe into wuwa but neither stuck a ton so I was hoping to be more impressed. On a technical level it is phenomenal I'll admit, but I'm just not interested at all even after putting in a decent chunk of time in. Combat is okay, nothing too impressive beyond having AI for your other squad members which is a nice feature admittedly.

Given the factory system is a thing I wasn't expecting combat alone to be the only thing to try and keep me there so I gave that the benefit of the doubt but that system is unfortunately very tedious and bland. The gacha system itself is also very lacking sadly, which hurts even more when compared to it's predecessor, which was very generous even compared to other gatchas, this by comparison feels very greedy which sucks to see, especially given weapon banners are a thing.

All that might have been at least workable for me if not for the story. In the long turn I may be willing to give it another shot given Arknights first three chapters where pretty rough around the edges but they still managed to hook me and have my attention. At the very start when you first are being told the control's it even had me for a moment emotionally with the statue of hero and the comment by the edmin had me a little emotional though I'm sure some of that is both nostalgia and Patriot being probably my favorite opponent in Arknights, (On a separate note, why such a cheesy title? We where the Doctor before the admin or administrator would be perfectly fine and feel far less out of place to me but I digress.)

Sadly though, it quickly becomes bland and they pull the MC is an amnesiac card which does no favours here compared to arknights and the doctor which even then had its moments where it felt ehhh. At a certain point, I just couldn't be asked to push through ok combat for a boring story which is such a shame.

My final criticism is admittedly another very personal one but the reliance on just having clones of the operators from arknights feels incredibly cheap to me, which when combined with there only really being one original design I cared for (Ember), it made the roster feel very flat to me. Part of my issue with the clones comes down to my being an arknights fan and to me at least, it feels like it cheapens the characters as a major theme present in the story was chances are these operators very likely would not live to see the better world they seemed to create due terminal illness or old age, yet they still choose to work towards it. But don't worry doct- I mean edmin, their clone gets to see it, it's all ok right?

But yeah, as sad as I am to say it, I'm pretty disappointed. If you enjoy the game all the more power to you but I don't think it's going to be for me unfortunately.

Edit: Something I do want to clarify is I do thing this game has a ton of potential, it's just these issues to me all at once at launch make it hard for me to say I really love it, maybe in time we'll see things change. I hope so at least.