Maybe I should just buy Factorio? I'd like Arknights: Endfield a lot more if it would stop trying to be Genshin Impact and just let me build

I'm begging anime gacha games to try something new. The chokehold Genshin Impact has on the genre is so obvious that anytime a new one shows up at The Game Awards I force my friends to guess if Hoyoverse made it or not. I've played a lot of them and I can barely tell anymore.

There's nothing wrong with Genshin Impact, but I only need so many open world action RPGs where you meet anime characters you can collect like Pokémon, and most of the copycats don't have anything else going on.

Arknights: Endfield, however, does have something else going on: surprisingly robust factory building. I can't name another gacha game where you mine raw materials and process them in a maze of conveyor belts. Factorio always looked like a game I'd never click with, but Endfield has turned me into the kind of person who can spend hours reorganizing their base just to make it slightly more efficient.

The problem now is that I like the factory building so much that I'm disappointed when Endfield interrupts it to make me play more of its sad sci-fi Genshin Impact-style adventure with characters that make me want to turn the sound off.

Evil, corruption-spreading rocks have appeared on the planet and everyone is relying on your character, the Endministrator, to solve it. Amusingly, they have amnesia so it takes a few hours before you realize the disturbing truth that you're in charge of a corporation that exists to colonize planets and drain them of their resources.

I can deal with that, I just need Endfield's cloying cast of Endministrator-obsessed anime characters to be quiet and let me build. Endfield's main storyline is written as if it's worried you'll turn it off if someone doesn't remind you that you're the only one in the world who knows how to fight rock monsters with a team of four characters and their special abilities. I'd be surprised if that's true, because it's really not that complicated. Much like Genshin Impact, you basically spam skills at spongey enemies and dodge out of their attacks until they die. Your team can set up combos by debuffing enemies with different elements, but, at least for the story missions, you don't really need to do all that to get by.

I'd forgive Endfield for borrowing so much from Genshin Impact if it at least let me do more of the factory building before dragging me back into the most forgettable anime episode ever. What's worse is that even when it does, it's all a drip feed of tutorials for concepts it taught you no less than 15 minutes before. There's hand-holding and then there's whatever the hell Endfield is doing, where it barely trusts me to know how to close a window without an explanation. All of it is unnecessary when the factory building couldn't be any easier to do, whether you're running around in third-person or using the top-down view to select and place buildings. I have no experience playing these types of games and it made sense to me within minutes.

When it's finally just you and the assembly line, Endfield starts to make a lot more sense as an evolution of the original Arknights mobile game, which is essentially a hero-based tower defense game. The semi-open world of Endfield is full of plants and rocks to collect and funnel into your processing plant to make gear and other items for your characters. Why walk around and smack crystals for ore when you can suck it all up with remote mining rigs? The valleys will be filled with power lines and automated turrets when I'm done so that I never have to do any of the dirty work myself. The power of automation is the best form of progression the game has, especially when everything else requires your usual gacha game grind.

Is it kind of horrific to watch a planet that is already dying to evil rocks get subsumed by the machine of industry? You bet. Is it also unbelievably satisfying to construct the most efficient base as possible and watch the materials flood in? Absolutely. I don't even know what it's all for, but the numbers keep going up.

Inevitably, I'm thrown back into more missions where I have to endure more anime nonsense fighting gas-masked bandits from Mad Max: Fury Road and I question if Endfield is really worth it. Every time I open the menu I'm reminded how manipulative these games can be, with their pages and pages of minor tasks to complete so you feel like you have a fighting chance at not having to spend any real money, even though what you're doing is more likely to cause fatigue than fun. It's exhausting just to look at and even worse to actually engage with once the story missions run dry and you're forced to grind until new ones appear.

I often think about how great Hoyoverse games would be if they weren't gacha games. Honkai: Star Rail is an excellent turn-based sci-fi RPG with a sharp sense of humor that made me laugh more than most games I've played. Zenless Zone Zero and Genshin Impact's character designs and animations are more fun and expressive than a lot of action games. But they're all designed to be uphill battles against the looming threat of having to relinquish your credit card.

Endfield really isn't that different. It's a gateway drug to factory building buried underneath an experience that is desperate to appeal to the same people who log into Genshin Impact every day. I'd enjoy it more if it just let me get my hands on the one part of it that is actually fun to play without having to do my action RPG homework first. Maybe I should just finally install Factorio.