Sleek and Stylish; Needs Sanity Tweaking – Arknights Review

Visuals (5/5): Great game with a modern, retro-touched UI reminiscent most recently of NieR: Automata’s digitized monochromatic design, but with more hits of color. Art style is uniquely painted among the cel-shaded anime flat-colors of this genre and imparts a grungy, yet classy aesthetic that fits the game’s somber, dystopian vibe extremely well. Character designs are functional and stylishly exaggerated for once and not just layers of visually tiresome frills upon wings upon ornaments like many other gacha designs. Pleasing to the eye overall without any of the garishly oversaturated shades common to this genre of art. Somewhat disappointed that the combat art was reduced to simple-shaded chibis, but the appeal grows on you after a while and I couldn’t think of a different way to present the combat without looking discordant with the rest of the game’s style anyway (full-proportioned characters in combat would look clumsy and awkward in limited animation, but fully 3D models detract from the 2.5D look, so I find the decision in the combat art quite carefully thought through). Gameplay (3/5): Tower defense style with the game’s own gacha twists to deployable units, though all are very viable and you don’t truly suffer from not having “enough” 5/6-stars until very much later in the game, when you will undoubtedly be guaranteed several 5-stars at the least if you manage your Orundum (in-game premium shop currency) and Originium (directly purchasable currency that can also be converted to Orundum at fairly steep rates compared to other gachas—1 USD = 1 Originium = 180 Orundum out of 600 Orundum per character pull attempt, so a little over 3 USD per attempt at a character; there are Originium deals with larger packs you buy, of course). Aside from an even playing field for the most part, the game lacks social aspects like clans/group defense missions that you team up for/even a general region chat. It plays like a fully single-player game with the exception of your base’s Reception Room operators playing Cluedo with your (probably) sparsely populated friend’s list. This is a big negative, but ultimately not a dealbreaker. What will be a huge sticking point for me, especially later, is the exorbitant costs of doing missions, especially resource farming missions. At 20+ Sanity per attempt on worthwhile runs (and 10 for the easiest one), your measly 100-200+ Sanity pool (the game’s equivalent of the action points system) will vanish like water down a drain. It’s incredibly frustrating to no longer be able to do anything (not even practice missions which cost 1 Sanity for some reason) once you’re out of Sanity, but it’s even more frustrating when you run maybe 5 or 6 resource missions and you’re out of Sanity already. The game attempts to supplant this with early Sanity replenish bonuses for new players and the ability to use Originium to replenish Sanity as the standard, but this will not last and the inevitable Sanity drain as a F2P player is the elephant in the room. Unfortunately, with such a glaring action points problem upcoming once I use up my newbie bonuses, I can’t give this game five stars for only letting me play about 10-20 minutes every day. Tweak the Sanity costs down, or a lot of players will hit that wall running.
Review by Tythius on Arknights.