Arknights

Rhodes Island is a pharmaceutical company with a strange problem: the deadly infection it is fighting keeps dragging it into battle. Arknights is a tower-defence RPG where you play the Doctor, a tactician working under the young leader Amiya, sending squads of Operators into operations to protect the innocent in a world that would rather panic.

The battles are the strategy kind done properly. Enemies follow paths across the map, and you spend deployment points to place Operators on the right squares at the right moments: Vanguards to hold the early rush, Snipers for the skies, Defenders to plug a lane, Medics to keep everyone standing. Each of the hundreds of Operators has a class, a skill with a timing you control, and a cost — and late stages are puzzles where the wrong order loses by a single leaked enemy.

Between missions you build out the Rhodes Island base, assigning Operators to facilities that produce the materials your roster needs to grow. Cleared stages can be handed to Auto Deploy, which replays your winning setup — handy for daily farming. The presentation carries a lot of weight: clean anime art, a serious soundtrack, and big-name Japanese voice acting throughout.

Arknights asks for thought rather than fast fingers, and the story is bleaker than the art suggests, in a good way. It is light on device demands, too — 2 GB of RAM and 2 GB of free storage is the stated minimum. Strategy players who want a tower defence with real depth will find few better on mobile.