We took a journey back to Warframe recently, the cooperative space based third person shooter from developers Digital Extreme where you take on the role of a Tenno, a race of super soldier (space ninjas) that went into hibernation and have now been rediscovered by the twisted Grineer who are looking to dominate the galaxy. We previously played the game back in November 2013, so needless to say there have been a few changes. We spent a few hours checking the game out and see if the game still holds up.

Graphically the game does indeed look much better, though originally it always looked great it does at least seem like there have been graphical tweaks from the games end, and the special effects from some warframes (the players# interchangeable classes) especially a character like Volt who fires electricity all over the place who we got to try out in the tutorial. The tutorial was a great indicator of how much the game has developed, originally just a small tutorial at the beginning of the game it now instead offers a more prolonged experience and really develops the storyline a lot more. Quite a few more mechanics are on show and we got a more well-rounded idea of the kinds of things we’d be doing on our normal missions; the mission culminates in an encounter with the games bad guy and we steal a ship to get away.

The ship now acts as our base of operations, able to walk around inside it is an addition that has come post our initial First Look, with the various aspects and features of the game (PVP, the Shop, Crafting station, etc. ) being accessible through the different stations it acts as an interactive menu, which is actually pretty cool. The different features are unlocked by acquiring shards needed to power them up, which are picked up by progressing the games’ main storyline, expanding the tutorial to a more narrative format instead of being purely mechanical. Jumping into the quest menu, a map of our solar system, we got the chance to check out any of the currently unlocked maps around our age range or higher, with certain areas flagged as being the location to progress the story-arc campaign for the game.

Questing, particularly early on, is generally pretty easy and doesn’t provide a massive challenge, whilst the maps seem to scale up the number of enemies you encounter based on the size of your group; yes your group. Jumping into a mission automatically queues you with other people on the same mission and you are thrown into the fight together, which is pretty cool on paper but the reality for us was that we didn’t feel much of a benefit apart from things died quicker (mitigated by there simply being more enemies), there’s zero communication through groups and people either stay together and fight towards the same objectives or someone splits off and goes their own way.

There are in game mic comms, but we didn’t come across a single person that used them, but the combat for the most part didn’t test us too much and so communication wasn’t really needed, albeit you do feel it getting slightly more difficult as you level up and face one or two situations where things get a little hairy.

The difficulty scale didn’t scale up quick enough for our liking though, we didn’t have to think about cover that much, we could just stand in the open firing at enemies, not needing to prioritise one target over another as most of the time they were the same types of enemies. The slow difficulty scaling we see as being a bit of an issue, it doesn’t prepare players well for later combat if it does indeed get harder, plus without the challenge it can get a little bit dull to play. Even in co-op where you’d hope players might need a little more strategy ala the types of group required questing in MMORPGs, because you’re ALWAYS in a group, but it’s never certain whether you will have 2 or 4 people, it seems to lack those moments where players really need to think their way out of a situation.

For a shooter it is pretty good though for the most part; combat is extremely high adrenaline, speeding your way across the battlefield to close down enemies, jumping and flipping all over the place in an aerial display. There was more than a few times where we’d become completely disorientated and would lose our target, further exacerbated by the similar colour palette that the game uses, this was even worse in PVP where both characters are jumping and flipping. We tried out three of the PVP modes: Annihilation (Deathmatch), Team Annihilation and Cephalon Capture (classic capture flag mode) and we really didn’t enjoy the Annihilation games that much (and they didn’t seem that popular) particularly due to the bad balancing where too often we would find it being a 2v1 with us on the wrong side. We did have a really weird moment during a Cephalon game where in the middle of the fight the game pauses, popped up a loading screen informing us that it was switching to a different server (or something along those lines) and then about fifteen seconds later jumped us back into the game.

Even after a few hours of playing I think it’s fair to say we developed a love-hate relationship, or at least a love-“meh”, in that there were elements we thought were cool, but they were counterbalanced that things we just found completely uninspiring. We loved the camera blur when focusing on enemies at long range, that it would enhance the depth of field and blur objects closer to us, a really really clever and unique touch. We loved being able to switch between classes and how drastically it changed your own personal strategy and abilities. We at least loved the idea behind the coop PVE and we’ve no doubt that playing with a clan at higher levels would be a lot more enjoyable than experience we were starting to get where things were feeling a little repetitive. We loved that in the store sold big curly moustaches to fix to the front of your helmet for the “Movember” cause (where people grow/try to grow moustaches throughout the month of November to raise awareness on mens’ health issues) with proceeds going to charity. On the flip side we found the crafting a little too grindy, perpetuated by the fact that most of your resources seemed to come from the hundreds of chests scattered around the maps that after a while we just honestly couldn’t be bothered deviating off the objective all the time to get and would have far preferred more resources in fewer chests to avoid what essentially felt like a grind.

There’s a lot to love in Warframe, it is enjoyable, it’s fast and definitely has the action packed feel, there are moments of pure joy as you sail through the air in a slowed down matrix fashion and eliminate your enemies, or when in a group we had to do a long double jump over a deadly gap and had to wait 5 minutes as our team mate just couldn’t seem to make it no matter how hard he tried. It does feel that there’s a lot of grind permeating the game to acquire new gear and Warframes and we can only imagine this gets harder as you level up and need more resources, and more tedious as you start get overly familiar with the randomly generated dungeons.

SCORE

• Graphics: 9


• Performance: 9


• Gameplay: 8

• Pros: Impressive graphics, a unique and pretty interesting story-arc, simple crafting and modding.


• Cons: Not much challenging content, fighting the same mobs gets a little dull, grinding resources gets boring.

Final Score: 8.5

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2015 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.