The gameplay is lots of fun. It's a very frantic space ninja wizard parkour melee shooter. It's definitely one of the fastest, most mobile PvE games around. Typically you pick a mission, load in with a squad of randos, then bounce through the mission at 30mph killing everything and completeing objects.
The but is that the game is extremely grindy. It's not at all jokingly refered to as Warfarm by friends. You're going to be running through the same tilesets doing the same objectives much.
Progression in the game is tied to warframes, which are basically classes, as well as weapons and mods. As you go through levels you'll get mods as loot. The mods give bonuses to your guns and frames. The mods level up using a resource you find by playing the game. A lot of the meat of the game is buildcrafting, coming up with effective combinations of frames and weapons and then modding them to do absurd amounts of damage. With some exceptions it's not a difficult game to play. even in the very highest levels a moderately prepared team is rarely in danger of loosing. it's more about the moment to moment thrill of blasting things and stopping every once in a while to level up yoru gear, or start building a new item, or whatever.
Re: Monetization - It uses a pay to skip model. Building stuff like weapons and pieces of warframes takes real-world time> I think buildfing all the parts of a warframe and the frame itself takes like three days real time. You can pay premium currency to skip the build times. They also charge premium currency to expand the number of frames an dweapons you have, or to get items that are otherwise rare and difficult to acquire through gameplay. You can get everything you neerd through gameplay but it'll be slow going. A lot of people trade extra weapon parts and whatnot to other players, in game, for premium currency to buy whatever bits and blorbs they need.
So, lots of fun, extremely time consuming, more focused on buildcrafting, farming, and gradually becoming absurdly powerful than tight tactical gameplay. the community is generally very friendly and helpful. The setting is utterly bizarre weird-fiction sci fi. The story is generally very well regarded, more for the characters than the plot, and there are lots of good performances ranging from serious drama to ridiculous scenery chewing villains.
A lot of people struggle when they first get started bc there's so much to do and little real direction provided, and the general advice is to pick something that looks cool and ask people for help on what you need to do to get it.
Like as a for instance, I'm at the end of the end game, I've been playing since the game launched a decade ago, and I spent part of the evening running a new boss over and over, tweaking weapons and tactics to see if I could more effectively take down the enemies. I think I've only been downed once all evening even though this is close to the highest level of normal content. So it's more about "well, if I combine this weapon and this weapon and these abilities, what will that do?".
Also, the real, real, real endgame is fashion. It's all about the drip.
Yes. But.
The gameplay is lots of fun. It's a very frantic space ninja wizard parkour melee shooter. It's definitely one of the fastest, most mobile PvE games around. Typically you pick a mission, load in with a squad of randos, then bounce through the mission at 30mph killing everything and completeing objects.
The but is that the game is extremely grindy. It's not at all jokingly refered to as Warfarm by friends. You're going to be running through the same tilesets doing the same objectives much.
Progression in the game is tied to warframes, which are basically classes, as well as weapons and mods. As you go through levels you'll get mods as loot. The mods give bonuses to your guns and frames. The mods level up using a resource you find by playing the game. A lot of the meat of the game is buildcrafting, coming up with effective combinations of frames and weapons and then modding them to do absurd amounts of damage. With some exceptions it's not a difficult game to play. even in the very highest levels a moderately prepared team is rarely in danger of loosing. it's more about the moment to moment thrill of blasting things and stopping every once in a while to level up yoru gear, or start building a new item, or whatever.
Re: Monetization - It uses a pay to skip model. Building stuff like weapons and pieces of warframes takes real-world time> I think buildfing all the parts of a warframe and the frame itself takes like three days real time. You can pay premium currency to skip the build times. They also charge premium currency to expand the number of frames an dweapons you have, or to get items that are otherwise rare and difficult to acquire through gameplay. You can get everything you neerd through gameplay but it'll be slow going. A lot of people trade extra weapon parts and whatnot to other players, in game, for premium currency to buy whatever bits and blorbs they need.
So, lots of fun, extremely time consuming, more focused on buildcrafting, farming, and gradually becoming absurdly powerful than tight tactical gameplay. the community is generally very friendly and helpful. The setting is utterly bizarre weird-fiction sci fi. The story is generally very well regarded, more for the characters than the plot, and there are lots of good performances ranging from serious drama to ridiculous scenery chewing villains.
A lot of people struggle when they first get started bc there's so much to do and little real direction provided, and the general advice is to pick something that looks cool and ask people for help on what you need to do to get it.
Like as a for instance, I'm at the end of the end game, I've been playing since the game launched a decade ago, and I spent part of the evening running a new boss over and over, tweaking weapons and tactics to see if I could more effectively take down the enemies. I think I've only been downed once all evening even though this is close to the highest level of normal content. So it's more about "well, if I combine this weapon and this weapon and these abilities, what will that do?".
Also, the real, real, real endgame is fashion. It's all about the drip.