First impressions

[harbl]

Hi here are my thoughts so far..

Tl:dr : Improve the mechanics with the sword. Add more maps with more variations of enviroments and mission objectives. Avoid Pay to win concepts. Do not use too many flashy effects. Skills are not so interesting atm. More types of enemies.

The good part

I really loved the design on the first boss. He had lots of health and requiered tactics to take down. Great job on him and I hope to see more of that as well. The guns work as they should! Nice feeling to them and they look great. The graphics in the game are very satisfying, if you remove the bloom effect ;) I love that the game focus on co-op this is so importent in this era of gaming when you can feel alone in singelplayer gaming, more co-op ascpects in the game please!

Weapon mechanics

Wow this is fun: I like the general gunplay the guns I have tried feels good makes me think alot of Mass effect. The improvements on the guns that you get from levelling up actually feels like they matter. Perhaps a way of trying the weapons out before you buy they would be nice so you know what you are spending the credits on.

Melee action

I am a bit annoyed with the design of the sword. Why does it have to be carried on the back? Its SOO slow after each slash that the warframe puts it on the back where its held by invisible glue. The game has a bit of ninja/samurai feel to it and I would rather have the melee action a bit smoother. Instead of a melee attack button I would prefere to equip the sword when I want to use it, pulling it from a scabbard, from the hip like a true cyborg ninja? I think alot can be worked with the effects and collisions with the swords on objects and enemies, the sounds are a bit too plain if you ask me.

Making melee more fun

When fighting with melee I do not get as much satisfaction as I want. The clash with the swords on walls or enemies seems a bit off. And why only one type of death animation when they get slashed in two? I want limbs off as well! A good example of melee action can be taken from Dark souls. This game has very crisp melee action and you can feel each block and slash, where it hits and how it hits. there are light attacks, heavy attacks and a good system to manage blocking attacks. Now I am well aware that you cannot combine your favorite games and their mechanics and expect it in a game that is only in closed beta, however you can always dream :) As my friend mentioned he thought that there was no point in charging up the sword when you can you the jump attack faster. I think the problem with the charged attack is that you can't hold the charge. This would be solved with using an equipble sword.

Repetative maps

After playing for two days now the maps feels really repetative. I hope there will be alot of more different maps other then the generic alien spaceship, perhaps planets even. The mission objectives do also get repetative after a while especially the lockdown, or take a huge detour to find a key, it gets old fast. Also Why must the exit always be where you start? Why not steal a shuttle or something. The constant backtrack to where you start is BORING! If you have to go back to where you start, atleast allow for a teleport or shortcut.

It does not take long to figure out how the map you play on is used in different mashups for each of the missions and you quickly learn the layout and you play on autopilot.

Ammo shortage

Now the guns are working as they should and seem quite balanced so far. However I did have alot of problems with finding ammo for that assault rifle you start with. I could have almost 100 rounds in the magazine and each ammo pickup only gives me 20 bullets, not even a half magazine and enough for one and a half kill. The ammo pickups should be magazines and not number of bullets. And I have to point out here that buying extra ammo for a mission for 1000 credits cuts in too much on the profit from the mission to be worth the effort. Now I should point out that ammo shortage does not have to be a bad thing, in the early survival games like Resident evil it added great gameplay to horror-survival levels every bullet was important.

I noticed that the sniper rifle and shotguns do not have such problems with ammo consumptions. Also I have had some problems with aiming with the weapons and standing close to walls. what happens is that the body of your warframe covers your aim and you can't see very well. This can easily be solved by making the character translucent or adjusting the camera angles.

The skills

So far I have only played the Loki, my two other friends that started at the same time also picked the Loki.. However we don't use the skills as much as you would want to. This is because activating the skills takes alot of time, the cloaking for example, when activating the cloak it takes up precious time, if you want to cloak you want it to be instant and without too many effects around the character so you see whats going on. While being cloaked I find the filter a bit annoying, I like normal vision and some nice cloaky effect on my character thats enough. Also it seems that you have no way of getting energy other than pickups. Why not get some energy for a melee kill?

Level system

Why do you have to get "pro" to get the final skills? If you go pro you get alot of benifits that to me seems a bit too much of the "pay to win concept". Everything except cosmetic stuff and XP boosts you should be able to unlock with credits. This is the most successfull standard in free2play with cash shops games. Look at planetside 2 for an excellent example of how good micro-transactions are managed. It does not take alot of time to level a warframe up to the point where you can't do any more levels because of the pro restrictions. The longer people want to stay in a free2play game the more they will be tempted to get XP boosts and cosmetic stuff.

Enemies.

What I have to say about the enemies so far is that you encounter the "robotic" types too often. I have encountered 3 types so far of enemies, the infected, "robots" and the human looking military. Here I would like to see more different types of enemies. More variantion and also new factions as well. 3 different types is not enough too make it interesting. also I love that I hate the oranged two-legged robots with the huge AOE knockdown.