With the rising price of next-gen games a hot topic of conversation, the case for free-to-play moving onto consoles should be easier to make. Games like Warframe, however, probably won’t help.
It’s a four-player co-op third-person shooter, pitting human players in Guyver-esque supersuits known as Warframes against a variety of evil alien cyborg types. If that scenario causes your eyes to glaze over with weary familiarity then rest assured, the game that follows is even more generic and characterless than you think.
Following a brief tutorial which teaches you such insultingly obvious basics such as how to move and shoot, you’re dumped into a densely packed front-end that explains little else. The game is structured around the planets of the Solar System and some fictional additions, with each providing a progressive mission tree to work through.
These missions are self-contained dungeon crawls in all but name, with a few elements of popular FPS game modes sprinkled on top. Your objective may involve capturing an important enemy, rescuing an important ally or exterminating every enemy on the map. In practice, it all boils down to much the same thing – move from room to room, corridor to corridor, kill everything that moves and loot every locker and chest for credits and ammo.
That’s a pretty standard template, but Warframe never builds anything of interest on top of it. The fictional universe is thinly sketched and the result is a game that could literally be any shooter from the last 10 years – only not quite as good.