For this week's iPhone Friday i tried Arknights: Endfield from Hypergryph and Mountain Contour on my iPhone 14 Pro.
I had seen many adverts for this game on various platforms, but i was always intending to try it out. But when something is seemingly being advertised so much i can't help but being a little weary why.
Our immediate impression of Arknights: Endfield isn't great as the game starts downloading an update without warning, without permission, and then forces us to restart the app, which itself took longer than expected. i appreciate that the game gave us the option to chose which language the audio is in, but then it never said that it was going to download other stuff as well as that audio. so instead of the 786.06MB that Arknights: Endfield advertised it was going to download, it actually downloaded 17607.41MB (or 17.6GB) and it took about 25 minutes. Once that was finished, the game then had to install shaders which took an additional 3 minutes or so.
So after 30 minutes we finally get to the game's home screen. It's an impressive looking screen, but it gets better when the game starts. the character select option looked cool but in terms of the game's story it also doesn't really make sense in hindsight. but once we go outside the tutorial begins and it's quite good. it introduces how to control the character step by step and for more complicated stuff the tutorial uses videos to show us how to do things. I also commented in the video that i thought the game's button placement was quite good, better than in Destiny: Rising, https://youtu.be/i4OljQxqzyg, because there was smart use of the same buttons and space for camera controls with my right hand.
Whilst the introduction to gameplay was good, in terms of story i have no idea what happened. i don't think it's ever explained in this video what we went through or even if it's normal. my issues with the game's story extend throughout this video and not just this opening tutorial segment. Our character is introduced as having amnesia and whilst we get a little bit of pity everyone is seemingly determined to talk to us and bombard us with information like we know what they're talking about. the game's story needs it's own tutorial to help give us context for it all. for example, key terms and names should be highlighted a different color and when touched we should be given a little bit of information to help us, the player, understand the context and story.
For me, from what i understand of it, i'm not enjoying the game's story. it's had nearly two hours to try and hook me and it's just not doing it. from what i understand of the story it seems like our character created or found a way to take advantage of a material what lets us create stuff, kinda like a replicator from Star Trek. we're at a planet and we're going to Terra Form it into something more suitable for mass production of stuff using this technology. But the local wildlife and seeming people already living there aren't too happy about this. it's possible i missed something, but i don't seem to remember any "why" being given. i don't know if we're a part of any Empire or not. i also don't remember any reason given for why we were away for ten years.
Thankfully, even though i'm not enjoying the story the gameplay is great. the combat is fluid and fast, maybe a little too fast for the camera controls so perhaps a tweak to the lock-on with a semi automated camera might help. the graphics are good and the video sequences look great. so the gameplay aspect of the game is fine, it's just the story aspect that i'm not getting into.
So that's why i've rated this game so-so. there's stuff to enjoy, but if you're like me there may not be enough to hook you. but it's probably worth checking out. just beware, it could take about 30 minutes after starting it to get to gameplay so maybe trying it on PC or console might be a better option.
Version 1.0.13 Played
