Arknights

Arknights is a mobile game that released globally around a month ago. The game is a tower defense that follows a story where you’re the main character that commands different operators. This week I’ll be sharing my thoughts and experience while playing Arknights.

The way the gameplay of Arknights works is that you have different units called operators, and each operator belongs to a certain class with different skills, traits, and abilities. Operators have different rarity values and usually, the rarer ones are better, but that’s not always the case depending on the situation. Since each operator can only be deployed once in a battle, you get to have twelve different operators to use each battle. Experimenting with different combinations of operators on different stages is part of the game.

Your objective in each stage or battle is to prevent enemies from entering your zone which is represented by one or more blue cubes. Depending on the stage there will also be red cubes where the enemies come from, and different stages have different types of enemies that have strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes there are boss enemies that usually have very unique traits such as being able to teleport through your operators or disable certain tiles.

Arknights at the beginning is pretty easy and it follows you through most of the mechanics. For the first few stages, you can get by without using too much strategy, but later on in the game, you’ll have to figure out which operators to specifically level up and use. A lot of the times you won’t be able to use the exact same twelve operators for every single stage, so you’ll have to end up changing your roster depending on the layout of the stage and what enemies come out.

There’s also base that you have where you can produce and sell resources, and the layout is extremely similar to Fallout Shelter with different types of facilities and jobs that need to be filled. Even though the base isn’t too interesting, it’s very important if you want to be able to efficiently upgrade and level up your operators.

New operators can be obtained through a recruitment system that happens over time or you can spend in-game currency to roll for a random operator. Some operators have increased chances when you roll, but they rotate every few weeks. Since Arknights was released in China first, there are currently operators that are still limited to the Chinese servers.

As of now, I have completed almost all of the content in the main story except for the challenge modes, but there are still unreleased chapters of the story. In the meantime, I’ll be spending time upgrading my operators and trying to finish the side missions while I wait for the next content release.

Overall, I’ve had a lot of fun playing Arknights, and I usually don’t really play mobile games too much. There have been times where I was struggling on certain stages and had to look up some tutorials, but I’ve been able to get through a decent portion of the game on my own.