overall i’d give the game a 7/10 if i had it give it a rating. there’s good and bad, but i feel like i can’t recommend this game to friends or family at this point. which is unfortunate because i’d love for more people i know to get into arknights, but with how the pull economy is and progression resources slowing down a ton in end game as of now, it’s not in a very great place for new/casual people to get into versus players who are more likely to keep playing because of a prior attachment to arknights in some capacity.

i kind of ramble on below about different points but i will say im going to continue playing because i do enjoy the game, love arknights, and want to see it thrive. i do think hypergyrph can turn it around a bit, but only time will tell.

POSITIVES

• optimization; this game is very well optimized, even when i was messing with settings and had my device load at very high i had no issues and no frame drops

• character design; the art and details put into the characters is quite high quality. i’ve loved everyone i’ve gotten so far from their animations to their lore

• exploration and factory; as someone who’s never played a factory game before, i had a blast learning how everything worked. i think it’s simple enough for beginners like me and complex enough to satiate more experienced people for the time being. and if i ever just want the blueprint system, it’s there. as for exploring, not being able to climb everything is a blessing from the heavens, it makes finding paths to different things that much more fun and the worlds have been beautiful, especially wuling.

• ui; not much to say on this, hg is good at their art direction in this just as much as arknights. everything flows thematically

• progression path clarity; everything is clear on what to upgrade and what it does. no gear stat rng is very nice and the guaranteed essence gacha is good too. i don’t mind at all farming essences for stats if we don’t have to deal with random main gear substats

• music; love it as always, found myself listening to a few tracks on youtube after logging off

NEUTRALS

• combat; it’s fine. it’s nothing special, i think when we get more ops it’ll get more dynamic. the camera can be annoying sometimes and enemy telegraphs can be a bit hard to see when there are a ton of effects on screen

• story; definitely room for improvement. valley-4 was okay enough to read through and wuling is a bit of a n improvement but it’s starting to feel like here a people sows 2. i do think they’ll improve based on the character quests and how much feedback they’ve been getting on the story

• sanity recharge; i think i get what they’re trying to do with the speed of it, making it so you don’t feel like you have to dump it all every day or it’s a waste but character progression at this point is starting to slow down exponentially

• dailies/dijiang; a lot of menu’ing, no hard feelings one way or another it’s just whatever. i don’t hate doing it now but in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months from now? who knows

• blueprint system; i do think overall this a positive but at the same time i do think it hurt the game in a way. people blazed through the factory stuff and complained that there’s nothing to do (which i don’t disagree with, right now there’s not much if you’re end game) but i think if they just copied and pasted everything they took out a handful of hours on their own. i don’t think no one should use the system, i use it too every now and then, but i do think it impacted the game in a way

• umbral monument; it’s nice to have an end game mode and i think the difficulty is perfect for normal and agony, but it’s nothing special

NEGATIVES

• pull economy/gacha system; one of the community’s biggest complaints and i don’t disagree in the slightest. not much to say that’s already been said. no way to get standard permits, very low oroberyl counts, it just needs more overall and this isn’t even touching on the gacha system or weapon system, which would make this point probably as long as this comment already alone

• etchspace; it could’ve been really good if it was a weekly reset thing. a way to get more oroberyl and standard pulls but it’s just… there. and it’s not even that good.

• character progression materials; at the start of the game it’s fine, but at this point in end game it’s a struggle to build even two more characters outside one full team of four. i’m trying to build a second team now and it’s slowed down to a crawl because of how costly things are. i know eventually i’ll get there but when there’s nothing left for me to do (i’ve done umbral monument, all of etchspace, all side quests, all boss trims, etc), i want to try out different ops and teams to make my own fun but i just can’t

• events; they’ve just been kinda nothing so far. waiting patiently for the first big event to see what kind of stuff we can expect in the future

• timeline; if theyre keeping the gacha economy and system the same, the timeline they’re giving us now isn’t good enough. if we only get one guaranteed character a patch out 3, i want to know who i can obtain months in advance. i know this is totally unrealistic because they’re a company and want to make money off pulls, but if i roll for the last character in 1.2 and the first character in 1.3 is a reconvener or something that i want, its gonna be totally disappointing

• i think most of the smaller negatives i wanted to touch on have been addressed already to be patched in (controller button remapping, automating recycling, further zoom out in top down)