This review has been a long time coming. I believe it was about a year ago I started playing it, and to date, it is now the game i have spend the third most time with ever at just shy of 170 hours. So to say I had fun with this title is an understatement. And while I haven’t finished the game, I find my group has for the majority moved on to something new. So between that and some technical issues as of late, I think it’s time for me to jump ship too. But this is a ship I will have to come back to at some time.
Story: It’s been a long cold sleep, and you have no memory of when you were placed there, why, or even who you are. If thing’s had gone as planned, you would have stayed there forever and forgotten. But Captain Vor had other plans for you. He discovered your chamber and planned to capture you for use as a weapon for the Grineer Empire, but things did not exactly go according to plan.
During your awakening, a strange voice speaks to you, telling you she can not lose you and forces you to full action for your escape. Guided by this voice, your first actions will lead you to extraction, but not quite able to escape due to Vor’s meddling, and your first quest immediately begins. Free yourself Tenno! Free yourself and find your place in this new and strangely segmented universe!
And this first quest, which serves as the game’s main form of tutorial, will set the tone for the rest of your adventure as you ultimately undo Vor’s attempt to control you and enter the game proper. But this is perhaps the weakest point in your initial time with the game as well. You see, once you finish this first quest it’s done holding your hand in any way at all. Nor does it hint at what plot-wise you should do next. Instead, you will be left to your own devices to figure out the mechanics as well as how the story progresses. And while this works to an extent as the game is an MMO that wants you to get engaged with the current events as much as the quests to discover the plot, it does make the plot rather weak at the beginning.
But weak is not the same as non-existent. You will eventually find your way to progress this story through a series of quests that your adventures to explore will unlock. Sadly the initial ones don’t reveal much, but like most MMOs, the real juicy quests are later in the game. And when this game decides to reveal things to the player, things take off really fast.
7/10
Graphics: From the word “GO” Warframe simply stands out from just about everything out there today. You will play the game from behind your chosen suit in a 3rd person game, but the style the game offers is about as organic in every sense of the word this side of a Xenomorph hive. Your choice of suit will likely look human, but have helmet (or other) parts that look more like metal growths then anything a human would make for battle. Your weapons tend to look smooth and almost like a mash between molded and grown in design (at least unless you are using energy-based weapons, anyway). And the enemies you face more often carry this same distinct feel more or less. In fact, there is really only one race in the entire game that takes a more synthetic feel out of the four you will ultimately face off with.
And that over-all alien-esque feel just permeates the environments, too. True they more often look made and not grown, but they carry a distinct feel that fits completely with the world… from derelict ships to ancient ruins to lush forests, and even pristine otherworldly palace-like places, you will find the game alive with it’s world.
And the game does all this game at absolutely brilliant performance. In my whole time playing, I never once saw so much as a frame-drop, and considering how fast the game plays, that is not just nice, but necessary.
The only thing I can fault this game with is that it is indeed aging a little, and you do notice a low-resolution part of a wall here and there. Not enough to stand out dramatically, but enough to know you are playing a game designed so it can be played on much older hardware then you are probably using.
9/10
Sound: The first thing you are likely to notice when you start Warframe is the rather base-heavy theme that greets you on the login screen. It sets a tone that what you are about to play is intense and demanding. It’s also a memorable opening step, which is good because a lot of what follows really isn’t.
Still, the range of the soundtrack remains fairly remarkable on it’s own. Ranging from tribal drums of war to synthetic/organic feeling tones of urgency to religious singing to suggest a deeper mystery then what you see, the soundtrack is directly designed to enhance the plot and action of every moment you play, and does so very well. It just is very little that you haven’t heard before. In fact there is a track in this game that sounds STRIKINGLY like the opening credits to the show Defiance that Syfy released a few years ago now, and I doubt it’s the only “heard before” moment you will have if you even pay attention to the music beyond it’s effect on the moment.
Sound effects also won’t be the stand out audio for this title either. Everything sounds good enough, but the total sound effect amount to your weapons firing, hitting things, or that meaty thud when you get hit hard. It all sounds great, but it’s also pretty much holding up a standard we have come to expect from modern action games. And with most of the game being these action portions, this is what you are going to hear a lot of.
The exception being the very organic army you will discover early on, as their roars, squeals, and screams, while not entirely new, strike a strong distinction from the rest of the game, and as such, these will stick with you.
But the real treat here, like many modern games, is the voice acting, and here it’s pretty damn good. From the quasi-artificial and detached yet motherly voice of the Lotus, to the slightly insane, and yet really personable Ordis, to even characters you will meet in Earth’s remaining city and AIs with no emotion outside of a love of information, everyone here is played out exactly as they should be and feels perfectly in their place. Even the awkward characters like a later boss you fight in the game named Vay Hek brings great things to the table. He has some of the corniest lines I have ever heard in any game ever, but he delivers them so heavy and with such conviction, you will be laughing at him as a character loving it the entire time. He literally makes himself a joy to fight by being so over-the-top and yet so perfect in his roll, and quite possibly my favorite character in the game.
8/10
Gameplay: Most of the time you play this game, you will be in fast paced combat as you race your Tenno around the battlefield at breakneck speeds, leaping from platform to platform in double/triple/bullet jumps while fighting off the hoard of whatever army you are currently facing with whichever weapons you chose to equip yourself with. It’s fast, responsive, chaotic and visceral and a damn good time. It’s also surprisingly deep for such a fast-paced action game with different combinations of techniques opening up whole new options, and that’s before we consider how customizable you really are when playing.
To start with, the game offers a rather large list of suits you can get as you play, each sporting it’s own strengths, weaknesses and abilities they will gain as they gain levels from unranked to 30. At the time of writing there are 35 suits, not including Prime (or high-end) variations of some. For example, the Mag (one of the three you can choose at the beginning of the game) is a speedy little suit that won’t take a ton of abuse, but will get you out of trouble quickly enough. In addition as you level it up it will gain powers based on magnetic manipulation, wiping shields, throwing enemies around, and all kinds of fun. On the almost reverse side of this is the Rhino, one of the first additional suits you get the chance to earn in-game. This suit is tough, slow (in comparison) and gains powers around armor and visceral close-combat.
In addition to this, you have a choice of literally hundreds of weapons to equip, divided into 3 main categories: primary, secondary, and melee. Primary weapons are your large guns, like rifles grenade launchers, or bows, where secondary are your smaller firearms like pistols or throwing daggers, while melee weapons are (obviously) things like swords, axes, hammers and the like. Each weapon carries similarities to others of their kind, but each one carries it’s own spin as well.
In addition, all of the above can be customized with cards you will gain as you play! Between missions you will be able to go to a station where you can open up anything you have equipped and select cards you have collected for the weapon type and slot it to the weapon. Some will increase your rate of fire, others will add new types of damage to your gear and others may change other factors. Simply dropping the card on your gear is all it takes, and you can even make these cards more powerful by fusing a currency called Endo into them, but this will cost you credits (another currency) and quickly becomes a balancing act as well. Everything you equip levels up as you use them going from unranked to level 30, and each level will add a single point of space to that piece of gear. Each card you use will cost you these points, which in turn also goes up with each level you give it via the endo fusion process. In short, the more you use a weapon or suit, the more powerful you can make it.
So how do you get new weapons and suits you ask? Well there are a few ways. The easiest way is to buy them, but we will come back to that since this game is free2play, and therefore relies on real-money currency to stay afloat. But if you don’t want to spend real cash, you can build just about anything you want and some things can only be gained by doing so. You do this by buying blueprints for what you want with credits and collecting parts and scraps while in a mission to use with them. Once you have what you need, you can go to a workbench and start the manufacture process, which will take anything from 1 minute to a couple days in real-time. You do NOT need to be logged in for these to progress.
The only exception to this is suits. True the option to buy them directly remains in most cases, but you can only by blueprints for the total suit. The parts required to make the suit (usually 3) also come in the form of blueprints which you you can not buy in any way, but will need to earn in specific missions they drop for (usually against a specific boss). This may mean if you do not wish to buy a suit, you will need to grind that boss repeatedly to get all the parts you need to complete your build. It can be a pain in the ass, but not a huge one, as if you are grinding a boss for parts, chances are you can get a group of friends or join a random group trying to do the same and have more fun with it.
But when we talk about buying things, we have to get down to the economy of the game, and this is based on about five currencies:
- Credits: This is the most common currency in the game and earned mainly within the missions themselves. You can get them by selling upgrade cards or material you picked up, but you can not buy them with real money. This is the resource you will use when buying blueprints of weapons you want as well as part of what you need to use to upgrade the cards you have. You can get this by selling those cards or materials you do not believe you will need for it.
- Platinum: This is the second most common currency and the one you can buy for actual cash. This is used to buy gear outright as well as materials if you don’t want to go hunting for it. It is also used to expand how many of each type of gear you can keep in your inventory by buying additional slots for them. You start with 50 (or about $3.33 worth) and can get more by buying with real cash or selling things to other players. If you are going to drop some actual cash on the game, I recommend waiting till you have a coupon for 50% off to do so. You will likely not be strapped for this the rest of the game after doing that once for $10-$20. You also will not be buying any real advantage beyond saving time, but we will get into that in a little bit.
- Ducatts: This is a currency you can only get by selling Prime parts. You can not buy them, and you only need them when dealing with a specific salesman who will show up at a random relay every two weeks. When starting the game, you can ignore these. However later on, it is worth seeing having some on hand and seeing what this merchant has as it is generally better versions of the gear you can get by any other means.
- Endo: This is another currency you can not get from other players or with actual cash. Rather you have to earn it in missions or by converting upgrade cards you no longer want into them. This is also the place you use it as a requirement to level up those same upgrade cards.
- Void Traces: The last currency you will really encounter in the game, this is collected in special void missions and is only usable to refine relics you might bring on those same missions to change the odds of what you can get when you open then (usually where you get prime parts and blueprints for prime versions of weapons and suits). This is another currency you can not buy, but can only earn by going on these missions without a relic equipped.
Overall the game is perhaps one of the MOST fair store systems I have seen. In fact, buying will not get you much of an advantage (other then not needing patience) due to how leveling works. In addition to the level of your individual pieces of gear, you have a level yourself called a mastery level. When you fill an XP bar, you will not just gain a level, but instead gain access to a test. Pass the test and you will gain a mastery rank. Fail and you will have to wait 24 hours to try again. Increasing your mastery rank is vital as it will give you two distinct advantages: Weapons have a minimum rank before you can use them, and unranked weapons start with the amount of points to upgrade equal to your mastery level (though they wont increase this till they level up to match it). As such, this game is balanced to be completely skill based and not be won by the guy who spends the most, which sets it apart from MANY free2play titles alone.
8/10
Bugs: While the game ran bug-free in general I can not say it was perfect.
- Server-issues: Simply put, the game ran perfect most of the time, but every issue I ran into was due to some server issue. This ranged anywhere from connections to log-in, to issues with updates, or even rubber-banding enemies. Expect these issues from time to time during your adventure.
Overall: Warframe is a brilliant example of a free2play game done right. It’s a lot of fun, action packed and never leaves you feeling like if you don’t pay up you will be behind somehow. It is actually a lot of fun and if you are looking for to play with your friends, this is quite easily a great choice. If you are looking for something to play on your own, you are likely going to have more of a challenge getting into the game, but it’s still very much worth your time.
Score:
8/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Core 2 Duo e6400 or AMD Athlon x64 4000+ or 2.2Ghz dual core CPU
- 2 GB RAM
- Geforce 8600 GT or Radeon HD 3600
- 25 GB hard drive
- Windows XP SP3 or higher
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350 (8 cores) running at 4 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- NVidia GeForce 960 GTX with 4 GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Official Website
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