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Well... this is the game that has been grabbing my attention for the past months and even tore me away from Genshin Impact (I suspect my Hu Tao is lonely and sad now xD). What is Arknights? Arknights is a Tower Defense/Gacha game from Shanghai developers HyperGryph Studios for iOS and Android. Arknights players assume the role of the amnesiac doctor in charge of deploying Operators to protect and defeat invading forces in Tower Defense fashion. Operators come with different skills and classes that players must bring together to successfully defend their objectives. Each Operator has a Rarity, Deployment Cost, and unique Talents and Skills, allowing for many flexible strategies. Launch Trailer from 4 years ago: What's the appeal? What pulled me in wasn't actually the plethora of cute or cool (designed) characters, even though those are definitely a plus for any anime fan or gacha veteran. I just really like tower defense. Be it Bloons TD, Kingdom Rush, or my beloved Tower Defense/Ego-Shooter hybrid Sanctum 2, I have tons of fun playing those games. And Arknights gives you simply a very solid Tower Defense experience. There's an endless variety of Operator (your towers) archetypes, each fulfilling a unique role on the battlefield, be it pure damage, blocking the mobs from reaching the end zone, slowing them, generating currency faster to deploy your units faster, healing, other buffs or debuffs. The possibilities and viable strategies you can come up with seem to be near endless at a certain point. There is also a plethora of enemy types, bosses, and stages, sometimes with environmental quirks and multiple pathways. There are also different game modes and between the main story, events, side stories, annihilation missions (where you have to defeat a whopping 400 enemies that come in waves), there's even a roguelite mode to explore. Arknights has a lot of content to offer for a free game. Of course the Gacha has it's appeal too; even if you stay F2P, you will occasionally try your luck in the character lottery. And raising your favourites' levels and skills to make them stronger is a core part of the game. You can even buy skins for your favourite characters. Latest event trailer with new characters and costumes at the end: As it is somehow with all Gacha games, they have great music too. For example, here's the BGM for the menu during a certain event series that took place a month ago: That all sounds great. But there are certainly cons. How can all of this be for free? The game itself is free to download on the App Store and Google Play Store. There's the usual in-game store where you can buy the premium currency and packs (and it's usually not worth it). As a Gacha hybrid, it comes with the genre's typical downsides: Operators/Towers have different rarities and "stronger" ones are harder to obtain and more expensive to level up. A stamina system that let's you only play for so long. Every mission consumes "Sanity" and when you don't have any of that left, you'll have to wait for it to restore until you can continue playing (or buy a refill, lol). You do get a few free Sanity refills at the beginning, along with level-up rewards. FOMO (fear of missing out). There are banners with limited characters who will either not appear again or only after a long time. Same with some events. Complexity of mechanics, resources to gather, things to level up... Especially if you're not used to this genre, you'll be overwhelmed at first. Apart from that, you'll need an internet connection to play and not everyone will like the art style or the anthropomorphic characters. The story (text to read) is huge and presented in the style of a visual novel, which can become tedious to read. I tend to skip the story and sometimes read it up online afterwards. From a gameplay perspective, there's also the downside that you have no insight into the enemies or their mechanics (especially bosses) without actually playing a stage. You can do practice runs though, that don't consume any stamina. Finally, it is important to mention that you absolutely don't need high rarity characters to win in this game. On the contrary, it is recommended at the beginning to start with your standard (3- and 4-star) Operators. There are even popular guides that revolve around using mainly 3- and 4-star characters to win and borrowing a high rarity unit from a friend. That sounds interesting and all, but I'm still on the fence. Can you show me some actual gameplay maybe? Sure! Just hit me up on Discord and I'll happily show you the game and explain how it works.
