Tweet
Here's the thing: it is cool to slide along on your bum while firing a rifle. It is also cool to transition from bum-slide into accelerating leap, to draw a bow and arrow in mid air and to plunk a pointy laser-shaft right in the cranium of an unsuspecting spaceman. It's also cool to hit a spaceman with a space-staff, to set your space-dog or space-robot on him, to tear him apart with superpowers. All of these things are cool, and they constitute 90 per cent of the things you do in Warframe. Is it fair, therefore, to conclude that Warframe is cool?I've been thinking about this a lot as I've picked at Digital Extremes' free to play spaceman shooter. This has been my first experience of a game that has always been on the periphery of my awareness, a contemporary of games I love like Guild Wars 2 and Destiny. The ways in which Warframe is (and isn't) like those games and the particular niche it has carved for itself both as a game and as a capital-P Product are worthy of exploration. This is a game from games media's traditional blindspot: south of triple-A but north of indie, a powerhouse of Steam's free-to-play section and the parts of the PSN store you probably don't go to much.
The first line of my notes reads 'slow-mo bow is cool', and let me reiterate: it is. Warframe is a fundamentally well-conceived action game, particularly in the context of free to play MMOs. It's the lovechild of Phantasy Star Online and Vanquish, kinetic action rendered infinitely consumable by sprawling progression paths and deep grind. It's not a Platinum-tier action game in its own right - it inherits some floatiness and imprecision from the PC MMO half of its parentage - but it comes much closer than you'd expect.
Read more…
More...