For the purposes of this review, I started a new account and played through the main story quests up to and a little past 'The Sacrifice'. This way I felt I could best see the 'new player experience' firsthand. Unfortunately, I can't really just 'forget' my 1800 hours of playtime, so despite the fact I was playing solo from MR1-5, I'm basically approaching the game from the perspective of prior knowledge, perhaps as if I had the wiki open at all times on my secondary monitor.

On my 'real' account I actually just hit MR30 the other day, completed the trial, and now am working toward LR1, so I have fairly extensive knowledge of Warframe.

So to begin with I want to mention the pedigree. Warframe is a game made by the developers of Unreal Tournament's gameplay elements, Digital Extremes. They're responsible for all the good ones, UT99, UT2003 and UT2004. Epic Games essentially provided the Unreal engine, and DE made the games. They did not however work on UT3.

Warframe inherits many little things from those early games, mostly in terms of level design but also in the way some architecture is designed, Cetus for instance resembles to my mind maps such as DM-TokaraForest in just the way lights are rendered, but also the shapes and designs of structures. There are several weapons in Warframe that resemble classic UT weapons, such as the Stug and the Biorifle, the Ogris and the Rocket Launcher, the Drakgoon and the Flak Cannon.

The game itself however is quite unlike the UT series, and most of the gameplay involves basically speedrunning through missions as fast as possible to achieve goals to procure items that you want or need, often specifically so you can obtain other items, so you can get some other widget that lets you build something cool. There's an inhuman amount of 'grinding' for things which can be fairly frustrating at times and often relies on the player to find variety in gameplay themselves.

The movement system and mastering it is probably one of the most rewarding aspects of the game. Once you get good at it, I think just being able to beat other Tenno from point A to point B is satisfying in itself, but also the environments are generally fun to navigate. This is probably one of the largest barriers between brand new players and veterans, because learning how to move fast in Warframe is hard, much harder than just having 'good gear'.

'Good gear' in Warframe I suppose, generally means setting the right mods into your weapons, having good weapons as a base, and using 'primed' Warframes whenever possible. It is perhaps more important than anything to upgrade the right mods at the right time, and one criticism I would level at the game is that, by the time you are considering upgrading mods at all, when you have enough credits to even rank up a single mod, you haven't yet been dropped the non-flawed version of Intensify you want to level.

In general, one thing I'll say about earlygame Warframe is that nobody is actually playing the regular nodes in Warframe at this point of time. I actually swapped regularly between every region in the game, intentionally seeking any open party out there, and often just was stuck playing solo, so for newbies, expect to play solo a lot. 95% of my Earth > Sedna clear was solo, I had to ask for help once or twice for Interception because otherwise it is simply impossible as a solo Excalibur, but otherwise I was alone.

Overall, I think the Warframe community is generally pretty good. One thing I noticed, and that you will notice, is that some players are just looking for excuses to give 'things' to people - an example is a guy in a clan I joined on my newbie account purely for the research gave me Ivara Prime, just all the parts for it, for free, because I couldn't do Lua Disruption yet. He didn't have to or anything, he just felt like it.

Warframe is also 'free' in a way that honestly feels exceptionally fair to me. There's plenty of 'free to play' games out there but in the case of this one, there have been many occasions throughout the lifecycle of the game where I've sort of just sat there for a moment and realised, 'I didn't even pay for this experience'. One moment for instance was Railjack, piloting my ship for the first time. Another was during 'The War Within'.

I haven't even talked about the story and the story quests in this game at all yet, because I can only really say one thing: do not get spoiled on it by looking it up. Simply complete the mainline quest chain until you're done. The story in this game is so good that other players will go out of their way to not spoil the game for you. It's really good.

So I think generally, it's hard to even really explain why I would recommend Warframe or who I would recommend it to, but... it's a fast-paced FPS where you can double jump and flip around and shoot, stab, cut, explode and eviscerate space marines as a cybernetic space ninja, it's pretty fun as long as you're into the Diablo-style 'grinding one thing for the item you want' loop.

As a special note for those who don't find 'grinding' interesting, you can as far as I can tell clear every quest in Warframe without grinding at all. All of the grinding is optional because you can clear every quest up to 'The Sacrifice' as a minimally modded Excalibur, which you get for free at the start of the game. Picking up and starting from nothing, even as a solo player is entirely possible nowadays and has only a couple of annoying timelocks. So, even if it doesn't interest you, maybe give Warframe a try. It's free and fun.

For the purposes of this review, I started a new account and played through the main story quests up to and a little past 'The Sacrifice'. This way I felt I could best see the 'new player experience' firsthand. Unfortunately, I can't really just 'forget' my 1800 hours of playtime, so despite the fact I was playing solo from MR1-5, I'm basically approaching the game from the perspective of prior knowledge, perhaps as if I had the wiki open at all times on my secondary monitor. On my 'real' account I actually just hit MR30 the other day, completed the trial, and now am working toward LR1, so I have fairly extensive knowledge of Warframe. So to begin with I want to mention the pedigree. Warframe is a game made by the developers of Unreal Tournament's gameplay elements, Digital Extremes. They're responsible for all the good ones, UT99, UT2003 and UT2004. Epic Games essentially provided the Unreal engine, and DE made the games. They did not however work on UT3. Warframe inherits many little things from those early games, mostly in terms of level design but also in the way some architecture is designed, Cetus for instance resembles to my mind maps such as DM-TokaraForest in just the way lights are rendered, but also the shapes and designs of structures. There are several weapons in Warframe that resemble classic UT weapons, such as the Stug and the Biorifle, the Ogris and the Rocket Launcher, the Drakgoon and the Flak Cannon. The game itself however is quite unlike the UT series, and most of the gameplay involves basically speedrunning through missions as fast as possible to achieve goals to procure items that you want or need, often specifically so you can obtain other items, so you can get some other widget that lets you build something cool. There's an inhuman amount of 'grinding' for things which can be fairly frustrating at times and often relies on the player to find variety in gameplay themselves. The movement system and mastering it is probably one of the most rewarding aspects of the game. Once you get good at it, I think just being able to beat other Tenno from point A to point B is satisfying in itself, but also the environments are generally fun to navigate. This is probably one of the largest barriers between brand new players and veterans, because learning how to move fast in Warframe is hard, much harder than just having 'good gear'. 'Good gear' in Warframe I suppose, generally means setting the right mods into your weapons, having good weapons as a base, and using 'primed' Warframes whenever possible. It is perhaps more important than anything to upgrade the right mods at the right time, and one criticism I would level at the game is that, by the time you are considering upgrading mods at all, when you have enough credits to even rank up a single mod, you haven't yet been dropped the non-flawed version of Intensify you want to level. In general, one thing I'll say about earlygame Warframe is that nobody is actually playing the regular nodes in Warframe at this point of time. I actually swapped regularly between every region in the game, intentionally seeking any open party out there, and often just was stuck playing solo, so for newbies, expect to play solo a lot. 95% of my Earth > Sedna clear was solo, I had to ask for help once or twice for Interception because otherwise it is simply impossible as a solo Excalibur, but otherwise I was alone. Overall, I think the Warframe community is generally pretty good. One thing I noticed, and that you will notice, is that some players are just looking for excuses to give 'things' to people - an example is a guy in a clan I joined on my newbie account purely for the research gave me Ivara Prime, just all the parts for it, for free, because I couldn't do Lua Disruption yet. He didn't have to or anything, he just felt like it. Warframe is also 'free' in a way that honestly feels exceptionally fair to me. There's plenty of 'free to play' games out there but in the case of this one, there have been many occasions throughout the lifecycle of the game where I've sort of just sat there for a moment and realised, 'I didn't even pay for this experience'. One moment for instance was Railjack, piloting my ship for the first time. Another was during 'The War Within'. I haven't even talked about the story and the story quests in this game at all yet, because I can only really say one thing: do not get spoiled on it by looking it up. Simply complete the mainline quest chain until you're done. The story in this game is so good that other players will go out of their way to not spoil the game for you. It's really good. So I think generally, it's hard to even really explain why I would recommend Warframe or who I would recommend it to, but... it's a fast-paced FPS where you can double jump and flip around and shoot, stab, cut, explode and eviscerate space marines as a cybernetic space ninja, it's pretty fun as long as you're into the Diablo-style 'grinding one thing for the item you want' loop. As a special note for those who don't find 'grinding' interesting, you can as far as I can tell clear every quest in Warframe without grinding at all. All of the grinding is optional because you can clear every quest up to 'The Sacrifice' as a minimally modded Excalibur, which you get for free at the start of the game. Picking up and starting from nothing, even as a solo player is entirely possible nowadays and has only a couple of annoying timelocks. So, even if it doesn't interest you, maybe give Warframe a try. It's free and fun.