We’re just two days away from the Destiny 2 beta, which may be a strange time to try out one of the game’s competitors for the first time, but that’s precisely what I’ve been doing over the last day or so.
I’d heard of Warframe before, but I never really bothered to investigate what the game actually was. I saw characters zipping around with swords and guns and it looked like some sort of arena fighter in the vein of Quake Champions or LawBreakers, ie. not really my thing.
But then this weekend, YouTuber SkillUp was talking about how he recently has gotten hooked on Warframe, and he described it as something along the lines of “Destiny meets Space-Diablo.” The mere mention of loot and classes and PvE content was enough to make me install the game on the spot.
I’ve put about seven hours into Warframe since, and it’s been enough to form at least some initial impressions I wanted to talk about. I’m going to keep playing it and there will be a lot more to discuss along the way, but I wanted to give it a first look today.
In short, I get the appeal. Warframe is instantly addicting, and easy to pick up and play. I’m playing on PC, but there are also console versions where I imagine a controller might be nice for this sort of third person shooter action.
The first thing that caught my eye about Warframe, even before I played, was the aesthetic. Its Warframes are a blend of Genji from Overwatch and the Hive from Destiny, which create these sometimes grotesque, often strangely beautiful creations that each have their own unique looks and kits. To start I picked the most Genji-like one of them all, the Excalibur, who has a special movie that’s quite literally just Dragonblade.
SkillUp described the game to me as “Destiny, but your super is always up,” which I’ve found to be pretty accurate. The pace of the game is frenetic, as you’re constantly drowning in legions of enemies begging to be shot and cut through. Your mobility is good at baseline and only gets better through upgrades or different classes, I imagine.
Combat feels great. I have yet to find a weapon I haven’t enjoyed killing things with, be it an assault rifle, bow, throwing stars, pistol or my katana, which carves up enemies into large bloody chunks. I’m not a fan of third person combat generally, but Warframe definitely gets it right.
Right now I’ve been playing mostly with Excalibur, but a bit with Frost Prime as well, a character I unlocked through linking my Warframe account to Twitch Prime. As a F2P game, Warframe makes its money by selling additional Warframes, aka classes, and also weapons.
The classes thing I get, given the monetization format. You can build Warframes yourself in the game by finding the right components and blueprints, but it’s a lengthy, expensive process. But I’m less sure how I feel about the game treating most of its weapons this way as well.
I got into Warframe with the promise that it was a loot shooter, but the way the game’s reward system is structured, most of the loot you get is mods to upgrade your existing gear, or at best, pieces to hopefully someday craft better gear. Armor pieces and full weapons have not dropped for me yet, and I’m not sure if they ever will, as the game seems designed around a lengthy crafting process or making you pay for unlocks. It just strikes me as a bit weird that I can play a game like this for seven hours and be stuck using only the very base starter weapons the entire time. I guess I’m just not used to being made to work this hard for even a single new weapon when games like Destiny and Diablo will constantly have you reshuffling your gear and loadout with new stuff you receive as you go. I’m not sure I like this much stingier system better.
There’s also the matter of what you actually do in Warframe, which gets pretty confusing not long after you start playing. At first you’re given a pretty clear-cut series of campaign missions that seem like they could be in most standard shooters. But then those end, and you’re sort of set adrift, not really knowing what to do next.
On Earth, there are a bunch of missions you can run and re-run, and they range from standard “go through this linear level and kill things” to wave defense to timed survival to taking capture points. In other words, no more story missions. I’m told there are more story missions to come, but I got to this weird period where I was essentially locked on Earth until I killed X amount of powerful enemies that seemed to only random crop up in certain missions, and I was way overleveled for every activity I was doing.
I finally made it to Venus, but now the process starts again, where I’m doing things like playing wave defense with three other people to “advance” to the next thing, but again, these are not story missions or even things with as much structure and diversity as Destiny’s strikes. In a way this reminds me a little bit of Battleborn, blending story and multiplayer, but honestly there’s even less story here than in that game. I find myself wondering what I’m actually working toward in Warframe. I feel like it’s pretty easy to feel lost and overwhelmed as a new player, and the game does a poor job giving me any sort of advice about what I should or shouldn’t be doing. I’m just leveling my classes and weapons, getting currency and crafting supplies and…I don’t know, just doing these weird little multiplayer quests over and over.
Still, it’s fun. I like killing things in Warframe and upgrading my guns and kit even if I may be doing it totally wrong. I feel like I need to rebind my hotkeys because having my skills on 1-4 when I’m using WASD to move is very cumbersome, and I think I need to reconfig in a more Overwatch-like set-up. I also think the game’s reward loops is off, as by hour seven I am starting to get sick of my starter bow and assault rifle, and wish I could do a little more experimentation. This is a game I would have easily paid $60 for in order to be able to play around with the classes and weapons more freely, but instead you have to buy them individually, and I’m paralyzed with fear I’ll be spending money on something that isn’t worth it because I have no idea what’s good or not. So I buy nothing. And I have no idea when I’ll be able to start crafting things at anything resembling a reasonable pace.
I’m definitely engaged enough to keep playing Warframe, and frankly I wish I’d found it sooner because this summer has been a desert for games for the most part. This seems like it could keep me playing at least until the fall rush starts, and maybe even past that.
I’m all ears for any advice you might want to give a new player, so let me know what I should or shouldn’t be doing. But so far, I’m impressed, and if you’ve ignored Warframe to this point like I have, you might want to give it a shot.
Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook. Pick up my sci-fi novel series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is now in print, online and on audiobook.
