Unexpectedly, my attention has been grabbed by a game I mentioned in my last post about games I’m anticipating — Warframe. I thought it deserved a bit more than the few sentences I gave it, so let’s have a look in more depth.
Warframe’s setting is our solar system, at some future point in time. You play a Tenno, a member of an ancient warrior race, and for various reasons the Tenno are seeking to establish a foothold in the area. The game starts with a brief tutorial, teaching you how to use your weaponry — each Tenno carries a main firearm, a secondary firearm, and a melee weapon. The game itself is a third-person shooter and supports both solo play and co-op missions for up to four players. It’s worth noting that adding and removing friends from a solo play session is pleasantly smooth — if you log in to find a couple of your friends are already playing, you don’t have to wait for them to finish their mission; you can just “join session” from your contacts list and you’ll warp into their combat mission right at their heels.
Once you’re through the tutorial, you’re presented with a solar system to explore by way of doing combat missions, which usually send you to an enemy facility or spaceship to conduct sabotage, raids, thefts, assassinations and exterminations. Completing each mission unlocks the next, and as you progress you’ll unlock multiple mission branches, so it’s not entirely linear. The missions can be replayed, and although the objective remains the same the mission area layout changes each time, so even ‘farming’ low-level content can remain interesting.
Character progression isn’t hugely revolutionary, but it’s well suited to the style of game. Your warframe (body-hugging power armour, basically) levels up as you gain XP, and as it levels up you can spend points unlocking new abilities and boosts to your stats. Each warframe has four thematically-appropriate powers – for instance, the Mag frame (which I’m playing at the moment) gets:
- Pull – pulls enemies to your melee range
- Shield Polarize – refills an ally’s shield, or depletes that of an enemy
- Bullet Attractor – makes a hostile target virtually unmissable for a short time
- Crush – “magnetizes” the enemy’s bones (neat trick!) to inflict horrifying damage on them
Your other equipment improves in a similar way, although new abilities only come from your warframe. All of your equipment can also be upgraded by adding mods to unlockable mod slots; mods are looted in game, and add extra damage or crit chance to your weapons, and extra defensive stats to your armour. You can upgrade and equip gear at will between missions; new equipment can be acquired via crafting, in-game currency, or the cash shop.
It’s definitely still a beta — just last night, in fact, we encountered a mission that we couldn’t beat because the end-boss kept knocking people into areas where they’d get stuck. But the development team is quite active with patches and fixes, which is all one can really ask for.
The best thing I’m finding about Warframe is that it’s quick and easy to start having fun. Within 30 seconds of firing up the game you can be in a solo mission shooting Corpus crewmen or joining your friends’ session to help them exterminate a ship full of the Infested. There’s little overhead; it’s instant fun, with enough progression mechanics to keep one coming back.
Wait, I lied. The best thing is the mobility and movement system. Tenno warframes are agile and limber, and the engine allows you to scamper up vertical surfaces, wall-run across bottomless caverns, and zip-line from platform to platform. I’m adding it to the very short list of games (along with DCUO and Firefall) where just getting around is half the fun.
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