AFK Arena is one of Android’s and iOS more impressive strategy/rpg gacha apps. The game is especially notable for a distinctive and highly stylized art style that positively brims with personality.
This helps to further incentivize players to collect and get the most out of the various heroes.
Likewise, the characters all have a surprisingly rich backstory which helps to create a sense of immersion.
All of these characteristics make for a game that you will undoubtedly want to experience to the fullest.
For most people that includes a desire to get away from the smaller screens on phones and tablets. The ideal gaming situation with AFK Arena would include a larger monitor.
Bigger displays are the perfect match for a game with such a compelling artistic style.
However, AFK Arena is only officially available on iOS and Android. But there are some ways around this limitation. In fact, you have a few options which will let you play AFK Arena on either PC or Mac.
How to Play AFK Arena on PC or MAC
The fact that there’s no PC or Mac port of AFK Arena might seem a little self-contradictory at first. After all, people are playing the game on both platforms. So how are they going about this process?
At the moment there are two main methods to play AFK Arena on non-mobile platforms.
Both of these methods use emulation. Emulation is fairly common these days. If you’ve ever played 8 or 16-bit games on modern gaming platforms then you’ve probably been using an emulator.
An emulator is software that essentially replicates a hardware platform. In the case of older consoles, the software will emulate those platforms on newer hardware.
There are some big advantages but also some disadvantages to emulation. One of the biggest issues comes down to speed.
Every computing device uses a particular type of processor. Most modern computer systems use x64 or x86 processors.
Modern consoles can use a wide variety of different processors. And older 8 and 16 bit systems tended to use less standardized processors.
However, the old processors did have one thing in common. They ran at speeds that were hundreds to thousands of times slower than what we find in modern computers.
This makes it easy for emulators running on modern systems to recreate those older, slower, systems in software.
So actually the drawback of speed in emulators is counter-balanced by the fact that modern PC and MAC computers are so powerful and fast that an emulator will still be pretty fast when playing these games on a PC or MAC.
We see something similar with emulators used to run AFK Arena. The emulators need to recreate an Android phone or tablet in software.
However, there’s a big issue here. Modern Android systems aren’t that far off from the specs seen in desktop or laptop computers.
So how do emulators handle Android? Especially when most Android devices use Arm processors rather than X86/64?
The answer is to use something of a hybrid approach to emulation. Android does have ports to the standard PC architecture.
The emulators will try to use native methods when possible by leveraging some of that hardware compatibility.
Likewise, the best Android emulators typically use some impressive optimization to run as efficiently as possible.
In the end, these emulators are a mix of natively supported systems and virtualized processes that combine into a singular whole.
This essentially creates a virtual Android tablet/smartphone inside your computer’s main operating system.
Think of it as a simulated Android device that runs within a window, or full screen, on your computer.
And it’s this emulated environment within which you can play AFK Arena. So how do the main options handle this task?
Option 1: Using Bluestacks Emulator
Bluestacks was among the first Android emulators intended for the general public rather than developers.
At the same time, it was also heavily targeted toward gamers. The people behind Bluestacks were well aware of the fact that most people didn’t want to fire up an Android emulator to use spreadsheets or productivity apps.
So the company put a lot of effort into tweaking graphical performance and integration with the underlying desktop operating system in order to play Android mobile games efficiently.
In short, Bluestacks should be a good match for almost any Android game. Part of this stems from the fact that the company has put a lot of work into ensuring games work well within it.
For example, most modern computers have graphic processing units (GPU) far more powerful than what’s found on phones or tablets.
Bluestacks is instantly aware of the GPU on desktop systems and will configure itself to make the best use of it.
Bluestacks also does a good job of differentiating between lower-powered GPUs integrated into a system’s motherboard and the higher-end GPUs running from expansion slots.
Users can tweak this even further by using different graphics renderers. All of this means that you’ll be able to get fantastic performance when playing AFK Arena.
The process of installing and playing AFK Arena on Bluestacks is fairly straightforward.
As seen with their GPU detection, the developers have put a lot of work into making the emulator as user-friendly as possible.
Running Bluestacks for the first time essentially presents you with the same experience that you’d find when turning on a brand new Android tablet or smartphone.
For example, you’ll get the standard Google account login. This will ensure you’re able to log into the Google Play store.
From here you can simply find AFK Arena’s listing and install it. You can launch AFK Arena from within Bluestacks in exactly the same way you would from a phone or tablet.
The only difference is that if your computer doesn’t have a touchscreen you’ll be using a mouse or trackpad.
Option 2: Using LDPlayer
LDPlayer is similar in overall usability to Bluestacks. You’ll go about installing and playing AFK Arena in the same way.
The only small caveat is that LDPlayer has two separate app stores. You’ll want to make sure you install from Google’s Play store rather than the “LD Store”.
The LDPlayer developers obviously want to prioritize their own store so they tend to make it the first thing you see among your default apps.
Google’s Play Store is installed by default on LDPlayer. You simply need to look for it within the system app folder.
Once you’ve logged into the Play Store you can install and play AFK Arena just as you would with either a standard Android tablet or Bluestacks.
If your computer doesn’t have much free RAM then you might see better performance with LDPlayer than Bluestacks.
LDplayer recently introduced a “Smart RAM” feature. The emulator’s Smart RAM functionality decreases overall RAM usage on your computer while also making it easier to multitask both inside and outside the program.
Advantages of Playing AFK Arena on PC or MAC
Of course, a lot of people might wonder why you’d want to play a mobile game on your computer in the first place. People do so for quite a few different reasons.
One of the biggest simply comes down to screen size. AFK Arena’s art design is gorgeous. But it’s often hard to really appreciate it on a smaller screen.
Even a tablet can feel a little too small when you want to really get a fully immersive experience. Seeing AFK Arena on your laptop or desktop’s screen takes things to a whole new level.
Playing the game on your PC or Mac also opens up a wide variety of multitasking options.
You can easily multitask within the emulator’s thanks to the larger display space. For example, you can use split-screens to run AFK Arena while also using a second app at the same time.
Or you can use AFK Arena in one window while getting other things done in another. This is especially useful when you want to grind within the game.
Of course, the options are almost endless. You’re essentially turning a mobile app into a program that can run on any PC. It opens up as many options as there are usage scenarios for computers.
How To Link/Recover Your Mobile Progress of AFK Arena on PC
Once you have AFK Arena installed you’ll probably want to continue on with an existing account.
Thankfully it’s fairly easy to do so. When you start the app up in the emulator, either Bluestacks or LDPlayer, it’ll consider you to be a new player.
To link your existing account you’ll need to go to the game’s settings. From there you can click on Account.
At that point, you can choose to switch accounts. Basically, you just want to switch the option to whichever account authentication type you’re already making use of. This typically comes down to using Facebook or Google.
Is It Legit To Play AFK Arena on a Mobile Emulator?
So far we’ve seen that this all works out on a technical level. But how legitimate an experience will this provide? Is it really the same as playing AFK Arena Mobile on a phone or tablet?
It’s safe to say that you’ll have the same experience playing with either of these two options as you would on a real Android device.
This is due to how both Bluestacks and LDPlayer operate. The programs emulate some hardware elements. But the actual operating system, Android, is running natively within that underlying environment. The end effect is somewhat similar to running Windows on both a laptop and desktop system.
Programs written for Windows should run on both of those systems because they target the operating system rather than specific hardware.
Likewise, Android apps are written to run on the Android operating system. The apps don’t care if that operating system is running on real hardware or within an emulated environment.
In short, Bluestacks and LDPlayer offer a fully legit way to play AFK Arena that’s the same as what you’d see on an actual Android device.
Can I Play AFK Arena on Mobile and PC at the Same Time?
The word switch when logging in for the first time might raise some concerns. After all, you might not want to permanently switch over to your PC or Mac for your AFK Arena gaming.
Thankfully when you use the switch feature you’re just switching to use of that account within the new installation within your emulator. You’re not actually choosing to only use AFK Arena on one platform.
You’ll still be able to play AFK Arena on your phone or tablet after installing it on your PC. However, there is one important point to keep in mind. You can play AFK Arena on both your mobile device and your computer. But you can’t play both at the same time.
For example, you can’t control what’s happening on your PC by picking a game action on your phone.
But you can have multiple instances of the game installed on various devices. You can also play on any of those devices. But you can only have one active game session running at a time.
If you try to run two instances of the game at the same time then one of them will be logged off.
For example, you might have a game in progress on your phone. You get distracted midgame and forget you had it running. Then you log into the game on your computer.
In that case, the initial instance of the game running on your phone would be logged out as you log in on your PC. If you proceeded to log back into the game on your phone then the ongoing session on your computer would be logged out.
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