Warframe - Free2Play Space Ninjas, Teamplay and a bit of Diablo

A F2P game by Digital Extremes. If you don't know them, I pity you.

"Good morning! I just woke you from cryostasis! You have no memory, so let me just say that you're a fucking cyber ninja and your favourite thing in the world is gutting random space marines. I could tell you why, but who the hell gives a fuck? Go out there and kill something!"

I may be paraphrasing a bit, but this is basically how the Warframe tutorial introduces you to life as a futuristic master of gun and blade. There's no story to speak of. All you need to know is that you're a so-called 'Tenno', a guy in sci-fi ninja armor (also known as a Warframe, ahaaaa!) and your job is to eliminate some creepy fuckers known as the Grineer. And holy fuck, do you eliminate those guys! You get to use all sorts of shotguns, rifles, (akimbo) pistols and SMGs, as well as assorted swords, knives, axes, hammers, the works. On top of that, each of the available dozen or so warframes gets to use unique special abilities such as fireballs and super jumps, as well as a few special moves shared by all warframes, such as wall-jumps, kick-flips and all that fancy athletic stuff any talented ninja picks up in grade school.

Badassery

Each mission has you and up to three co-op partners infiltrating an enemy spaceship, a mining facility or some other kind of base, where you get to carry out various objectives. You may have to find and rescue a prisoner or take an enemy VIP hostage, upload a virus or steal an artifact. With the exception of "kill 'em all" kind of missions, you always go in, fulfill the objective and get the hell out again. Depending on your style and abilities, you may do so in a stealthy fashion, sneaking past enemies or taking them out with a quick melee kill before they can sound the alarm. Or just go in guns blazing, alert every last soldier on the whole damn ship and blow them to kingdom come.

In case of the latter, Warframe goes out of its way to make you feel like a real badass, a force to be reckoned with, up to a point where it gets hard to tell whether you're really the good or the bad guy. Corridors fill up with dozens of enemies as the sirens announce your intrusion, heavily-armored soldiers taking cover behind crates, ramps and rails as they take aim at you. Make no mistake - Warframe is not a cover-shooter, so unlike some of the more cowardly enemies, you cannot actually sit safely behind a crate to snipe at the Grineer. You have to charge right at them, balls out, hack and shoot those suckers to bits! Speaking of bits: You'll get to see more than one exposed ribcage as you blow the armor off a baddie, carving them out like a pumpkin, guts splattering all over the place. You spend lots of time shooting aliens, cyborgs and robots, but some of the more humanoid baddies sport some rather gruesome dismemberment options upon death.

Sometimes enemies will trap you inside a small section of their ship to halt your progress. That's where this 'hacking' minigame comes into play.

Most of the 'trash' is really just that. You cleave your way through them, loot ammo and weapon upgrades as you make your way towards the mission objective and only the real big swarms of enemies and the rarer, boss-type Grineer pose a real threat. This is especially the case when you team up with random players via matchmaking. Don't get me wrong - the servers are always busy and active, finding a group of players never takes more than a few seconds, but chasing after a bunch of grossly overlevelled and overgeared veterans as they hack and slash their way all over the place isn't always fun. It doesn't help that Warframe takes score for everything you do. Players compete over who had the most kills, most headshots, most items looted and so forth. This may not bother you so much if you don't mind a bit of competition. Personally, I prefer playing on my lonesome or with my partner, which makes for a much slower pace, but also allows for a much more intense gameplay experience.

Intense, not only because we're playing the content at the appropriate level (you can repeat every mission an infinite amount of times), but in doing so, the odds to become overwhelmed and run out of ammo are a lot higher. And that's when Warframe is the most fun! When you have sabotaged the equipment on a mining facility, there's a dozen bad guys running after you and you're down to 20 pistol rounds and your katana and nothing else. Now you get to wall-run, glide down zip-lines and squeeze through ventilation shafts to make it to the extraction point or you make a stand and face an insane amount of bad guys against all odds.

Warframe also gives you plenty to look at in glorious DX11.

Good Diablo, bad Diablo

Warframe uses a healthy dose of RPG elements. Weapons and warframes rank up as you use them, allowing you to modify them with upgrades you find along the way. Warframe upgrades may raise your health and shields, increase your sprint speed or strengthen your special abilities, whereas gun upgrades power up your rate of fire, crit chance, maximum ammo and so forth. Melee weapons may even be upgraded with certain elemental flavours, allowing you to punish the opposition with fire and lightning strikes. Combining gear modifiers, i.e. stacking multiple +40% shield mods, will upgrade them to a +80% shield mod, much like gems in Diablo 2 and 3. However, there is no trading system, no auction house, a mailbox or any way to pass unwanted mods to other players or receive some of theirs. On the plus side, this eliminates trade spam, "gold"sellers and people maxing out their toons through an auction house without actually playing. The obvious downside is, that you may find all kinds of upgrades for stuff you're never actually going to use. You may still use unwanted upgrades to power up existing mods, but at a much slower rate.

The sweet thing about this system is that you can use just about any kind of shotgun, sword, pistol or whatever you fancy and keep on upgrading it, keeping gear viable at just about any stage of the game. Entirely new gear rather than upgraded stuff is obtained either by crafting (materials drop during missions), spending credits (only basic stuff) or buying them with cold, hard cash. Real money. Every cash shop item can also be crafted. However, depending on the item you want, getting your hands on the required resources may take days, maybe weeks to obtain, whereas shelling out a tenner here and there will buy you those sweet, sweet rewards straight away.

However, all the rarest, most powerful items in the game can only be crafted. Money will not buy you power! Also, some of the guns and warframes are tied to an experience limit, which you have to reach before you're even allowed to use them. A brand new player just buying all the best stuff with cash? Not possible.

Another Diablo-esque feature about Warframe is the randomized map layout. Even when you replay a mission you've already completed, the map will change, there may be different hazards, even the objective may change as you progress. You may be told to fight your way through a space-zombie invested facility to sabotage some machines, when suddenly the Grineer invade the place and you have to kill every last one of them. These events can happen completely at random, which is great.

What's not so great is the actual map layouts, which repeat over and over again. In fact, you may come across the exact same locker room inside a single starship three or four times, each time in a completely different area of the ship. The random bits and pieces of each map are composed of modules, pre-generated rooms, which are randomly added here and there and there's always a certain amount of repetition involved.

In Warframe's defense, the game has only just reached open beta status and more content and visual variety will certainly be added as time goes by. Also, you're invading a fucking starship! Why would the locker room on deck 3 look any different than a locker room on deck 4? And why would a starship of the same design you invade on another mission look much different and feature a completely new interiour?

The repetition is logical to some extent and there's more variety as you level up and unlock new locations. Still, a certain feeling of deja-vu is very difficult to suppress when you walk into the exact same locker room again and again on every second mission.

Weapon mods raise your damage, crit chance, rate of fire and overall fun.

The way of the ninja

Yes, you can run up the walls, do epic backflips and kickjumps and slide across the floor whilst John-Wooing the crap out of fuckers left right and center. That's cool, fun to use and actually doable with a mouse and keyboard - this game was designed with a PC in mind, it's not a crappy console port and the controls work reasonably well. If you can't get the hang of the more difficult moves, the game won't punish you. The worst thing that could happen is that you fall down a bottomless pit and you'll respawn a few seconds after to try again. However, if you consider yourself a true ninja master, Warframe will throw plenty of tests your way. As you level up your gear, your player rank will grow along with you. Whenever you're ready for a rank-up, you need to pass a test. You might be required to shoot several waves of enemies with only your pistol within a strict time limit. You might have to run up walls whilst shooting targets. The challenges get ever more difficult as you rank up and if you screw up, you'll be forced to wait 24 hours before you may try again. Using certain items may require you to reach a minimum rank, but the really high, difficult to reach ranks are for bragging rights only. If you really want to test your skill, this is the way to go. If you can't be bothered, you won't be punished. Pretty neat.

Nothing to lose

If you're patient enough to craft all the guns and warframes you're drooling over, this game won't cost you a penny. If you're not that patient, look at it this way - you can spend a few Pounds, Euros, Dollars, goats or whatever the fuck they use in your country, unlock your favourite warframe straight away (you get to pick from one of three free ones at the beginning of the game) and be on your merry way. No time limits, no gear damage or any other shit to force you into spending money over and over again. You buy the stuff you want and keep it for good. That's pretty fucking generous, as far as F2P shooters go. And if you care about jumpy, hacky, slashy and shooty coop ninja games at least a bit, then there's no reason why you shouldn't be heading to Steam's F2P section right the fuck now.

-Cat