Warframe And Why I Love It

First off, I should introduce myself, I’m Andy and this is my first article for Yet Another Review Site, now onto what is hopefully the main reason you clicked the link to this article, Warframe.

Warframe is a free-to-play game created by Digital Extremes (Dark Sector,The Darkness II), it’s probably one the best, if not the best experience I’ve had with a free to play game. The objective of the game is to essentially collect all the things in Warframe, though recent updates have added some excellent story driven content with the recent Second Dream quest being a personal favourite of mine.

The gameplay is that of a third person shooter, though additional combat abilities such as melee weapons and special abilities dependent upon which Warframe you play as. Weapons are widely varied and unique from one another, ranging from tiny pistols to timed grenades launchers to a ludicrously powerful laser cannon. Your avatar in the world is represented by your Warframe. Essentially, each Warframe is your chosen class, each one with its own unique abilities, health, shields, armour and so on. These frames range from the all-rounder Excalibur, who upon activation of his final ability transforms into a savage mid ranged melee fighter wielding a lightsaber that flings blades of energy at his enemies for as long as you have the energy to maintain it, to Loki, a purely stealth-based class with no offensive abilities but plenty of enemy disorienting tricks up his sleeve, through to Atlas, a brawler who decimates his enemies by punching them into a fine paste with stone knuckledusters.

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Frost, Excalibur, Ash and Nyx, just four out of the twenty eight playable Warframes.

The mission types are also pretty varied, mostly PvE with a pretty robust PvP mode off to one side. You’ve got your standard Exterminate missions, in which you kill every enemy with the misfortune to step within bullet distance, Survival missions, in which you fight off hordes of foes while maintaining a life support meter for a shot at some nice timed rewards, Spy missions, which break up the shooting with some nicely thought out puzzle rooms that contain additional loot and the standard Defence mission, where you protect a point from wave after wave of enemies with a reward given for every five waves you survive.

Now, onto why I love this game. It’s a good game, in a time where the concept of free-to-play is often exploited with games like Dungeon Keeper Mobile and Simpsons Tapped Out, its great to see a free-to-play title that genuinely puts the game first before looking at how to make money from the people playing it. Another reason is that the premium currency of Warframe doesn’t actually afford players who are willing to pay a huge advantage over players who’d rather earn everything through play, I’d describe it as more of a headstart, you buy a weapon or warframe with premium currency and you get that weapon/Warframe with an upgrade to double its modification capacity, whereas a non-paying player has to put in a little work to earn it, something which I myself find immensely satisfying. Annihilating an enemy with the Opticor, the laser cannon I mentioned earlier, is all the more satisfying to me because I’ve spent time upgrading that weapon to just how I like it. They also update the game pretty regularly, with a nice chunk of new content coming out every 2-3 months.

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The main reason though would be the Warframe community itself, Digital Extremes interacts with the community quite regularly, with weekly streams of the game on all available systems and with their Devstream, in which they show off what changes they’ve got coming in future updates. A quick trip through the Warframe forums will show you how warm and welcoming the community is to new players, with the only real condition of entry being that you play Warframe. There are a few elitists mixed in there but that’s par the course for almost any video game community. Digital Extremes interactions with the community have even resulted in a few nice additions to the game itself, one being a rogue soldier from the Grinner enemy faction named Clem, who first popped into existence on the forums when a player misheard a Grinner trooper shouting “Get them!” as he charged forward. The other example is an event created from forum members joking about Darvo, a merchant who offers daily discounts on pieces of gear, pissing off one of the bosses by putting his weapons on sale at a discount. Sure enough, DE latched onto the joke and created an event in which you had to prevent the boss in question from murdering poor old Darvo.

Well, I hope you liked my first article/review/opinion piece/whatever, I aim to improve over time so don’t give up hope in me just yet.

Warframe is available to download for free on PC, Xbox One and PS4.

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