w2180.trashbin

The AK aesthetic always interested me, but I couldn't get into the tower defense gameplay of the OG. All I knew about this version was it was open world action RPG with factory elements. I applied for the beta on a whim and got in and put in my serious effortb to try the game.

The designs lack some of the charm of the OG AK look; it feels like the usual generic mass of extruded anime gacha popular these days. The character models are nice enough, with shaders meant to mimic the AK art style, which is a pleasant touch. The models also move fluidly, but it's still generic horny anime aesthetic, so while pretty, it's all things I've seen before. Only a couple designs felt interesting.

AK has never been balanced on gender ratio, but it's especially egregious here, and a few of the female characters are exactly the type of waifu trope I can't tolerate. The women also get really high level, meta kits, while the few men are very basic, servicable at best, and not present in the story. I am not the demo here.

Man, the story is so bad. I started skipping (some skips have summaries) cause the first world (Valley IV) was just a massive tutorial that kept dragging on. And do we really need 5 cut scenes of NPCs thanking and glazing the MC for helping them? Is this just Wuwa in a different hat? It's really egregious. Everything feels conflictless, with no stakes again like Wuwa. No one disagrees or mistrusts the MC and his extremely powerful company.

But yes, the story is just... Poor. Things are happening. The MC is a beloved CEO. I'm hoping it'll be revealed that he's actually destroying the environment and was a villain in his many past lives, just to give things some interest. I heard things pick up in the next world, but I have played over 20 hours to this game, and I'm still stuck on this boring, awful place with its dragging plot.

Environmental graphics aren't jaw dropping gorgeous, but they are smooth with minimal pop in, and while pleasant to the eye, looks exactly like other environments from other games. The open world is also very "small"; this feels less like an "open world" and more like an "open area," akin to what you'd see in a traditional RPG. Not necessarily a bad thing especially since you have to do a lot of building, but the open world also suffers from the same problem I had with other OW gacha: it's pretty empty. I don't feel any sense of accomplishment for exploring.

It doesn't help that movement doesn't feel good. The jump is awful feeling and hilariously basic in animation, considering how nice the character movements are. The dash is so slow and you can't traverse in water. The game wants you to use zip lines for speedy travel, but I find the zip lines to be more of a pain to set up (they have to be powered... So you have to build out to an area first). There's other players' zip lines, but they aren't always put in convenient areas.

Yes, the game does a thing like in Death Standing where other players' builds will show up in your game, like zip lines or stashes or artillery. Sometimes, it lets you sequence break, but often their shit is in my way, so I have to take time to delete them. I didn't see a way to turn them off.

Music is fine, but loops too quickly. I didn't play with English voices, but the sub translation and in game text are very solid. There are a lot of words just to say a simple thing, but AK is a very wordy series, so this is par.

Which leads to the factory building. It's pretty extensive, but not as intricate (yet? I suspect it'll get more complicated as the game ages) as a dedicated factory game. But you'll definitely be spending a ton of time on this, as it is tied deeply into the game progression and experience. If you don't like factory stuff, this game might not be for you. It is not optional.

The game does have tower defense, which is also not optional (in general). I did it once because the game forces you, but TD just isn't a genre I enjoy.

Gacha is painful with less than 1% rate. The weapon gacha is even worse, since it's highly dependent on the "prizes" you get from drawing the character gacha to roll it. (There are some other sources but this is the main one.) Unlike the OG, this follows the 50/50 rule, but no carryover on the 50 between banners. There's different currency tickets (standard and the one for the new unit, can't use between them) and a paid currency and a battlepass with 3 tiers (no gacha tickets). I didn't get the unit I really wanted to play, and that always kills my enjoyment in action gacha as well.

And you really need someone you enjoy playing, because the game has a lot of busywork. While the actual daily missions are quick-ish, the resource gathering is mostly manual (e.g. recycling centers, rare resources, stock trading, character bonding). It's a lot of traveling over the maps and it's so tedious. Since this is a beta, I don't care if I miss it, but it's the biggest deal breaker for me when playing the game for keeps.