Warframe on iOS.
Yep, I’ve finally seen everything.
(Photo Saved from Warframe)
Good evening, my peeps, and may the algorithm bring this piece to you.
I can’t believe I’m talking about this game today, and I’m super excited and nervous to do so.
Warframe is a free-to-play, online, multiplayer, action role-playing, third-person shooter game developed and published by Digital Extreme.
All Devices Warframe is Available on & When they released:
Originally on Windows PCs on March 25th, 2013
PS4 on November 15th, 2013
Xbox One on September 2nd, 2014
Nintendo Switch on November 20th,2018
PS5 November 26th, 2020
Xbox Series X|S April 14th, 2021
Now iOS February 20th, 2024
For now, I’ll be diving into just the iPad version, primarily on an 11-inch iPad Pro, based on our tutorial levels, digging into our usual topics: Gameplay, Story, and Visuals.
So, without further ado, let’s get into this.
(Grineer attack in the opening cutscene, Photo taken by Nia🫧)
Gameplay & Story
The opening cutscene begins with the lotus narrating as the camera pans from the cosmos to the eye pupil of a young girl near drowning.
The Lotus states, “For generations, you’ve slept. No purpose. No call to wake you.”
As The Lotus finishes, the girl swims to the surface to see her homeworld in ruins; before she can even take everything in, the culprits are quickly approaching.
The Lotus continues, “Grineer, seeds from the ruins of the Old War. Swallowing colonies whole. But there’s still hope.
Our survivor cloaks herself and makes a break for the last standing temple.
The Lotus explains, “The Tenno, Monuments of an ancient warrior cast scattered across fragile worlds.”
As the survivor places a ceremonial flower at the base of the encased armor sets, we get a cinematic cutscene of the warframes fighting the Grineer in the old war.
(Our Survivor, Warframe Opening Cutscene, Photo taken by Nia🫧)
Excalibur is the first and is depicted as the all-around soldier; Mag is next, showing off her shield and magnetic abilities, and finally, Volt showcases speed and electrical skills as they defeat the Grineer in their time.
The Lotus asserts, “Together they fought back. Bringing an end to an empire. Then they left. Forgotten like a dream.”
This leads us back to the current day, where our survivor prays as the Grineer approaches then she turns to blue dust, the same blue dust that left the warframes when they deactivated.
After the Grineer look amongst themselves concerned as the sky changes and lightning strikes all three warframes.
Finally, The Lotus insists, “Wake up, Tenno, Wake up.”
From here, the game begins after choosing one of three warframes we spoke about earlier.
Vor, the general of the Grineer sent here, gloates to us and places an Acarias on us in the hope of controlling us enough for capture to experiment on us to heal his people.
The Lotus overloads our systems enough to combat the effects temporarily, allowing us to take control finally.
There are a few levels related to Vor’s Prize quest that are also tutorials giving you a glimpse of mission types and species you’ll encounter.
Sadly though, while the story sounds good, it isn’t as well executed as it could have been, mainly because we’re told the critical parts of this story instead of being shown or, better yet, allowed to participate.
But Warframe has always had some of the best gameplay, which carries this franchise.
(Vor initial meeting with our Tenno, Photo taken by the Author)
Warframes carry three weapon types: primary, secondary, and melee.
We also have The Orbitor is our main hub to travel, upgrade our weapons & warframes using Mods we earn after missions or find throughout levels.
Now why I’d love to go into Mods and how those work it would make this post entirely too long, but to sum things up in layman’s terms mods are perks you can add to your weapons, warframes, animal allies, and the like and they each do difference things like increasing health, defense, and even elemental abilities.
While combat in terms of basic weaponry isn’t unique by any means, traversal and warframes, on the other hand, are.
Of course, we have our basic jump, double jump, and wall jump, but we also have a bullet jump and bullet time to help with tight platforming maneuvers and combat.
Also, Warframes have their own unique traits and abilities.
For example, Excalibur has the Exalted Blade, his unique weapon, and three abilities that go along with it: Slash Dash is an attack that will kill an enemy in one hit and cover a lot of ground, Radial Blind will blind all enemies in the area, and finally, Radial Javelin allows you to throw a power wave at enemies.
All this is just for one warframe and their are 51 others we can also play as.
Finally, while all this is great, the game’s very hands-off approach to the story, along with its limited variation to levels, makes this game hard to follow and stay involved in. Despite years of updates, the developers still haven’t found a valuable solution to this problem, leaving it up to YouTubers and the community to help each other sort through this messy world.
(Initial Warframe Selection & Description Screen, Photo taken by Nia 🫧)
Visuals
The gameplay didn’t take a hit, but the visuals did.
Of course, this is to be expected because to make an original PC game an app game, it’s necessary.
In fact, the game looks like they copy pasted the Switch version to app stores all the way down to the pop in, input lag, and obvious lock at 30 fps.
All of this won’t affect your game experience in all honesty but I will take away from it.
Also, the UI is AWFUL, specifically in terms of the chat when on your Orbitor.
It’s obnoxiously large and oddly placed In the middle of your screen, so you can’t do anything else while it’s open, and the texts look pixelated, which tells me that they just ported the game over with little to no optimization.
Finally, I do have to give woke praise because the levels we do get to expiernce are beautiful and do hold easter eggs like scannable cephalon fragments that provide war and the corpus housing prisoners that will beg you for freedom.
(Opening The In Game Chat Box On the Orbitor, Photo taken by Nia🫧)
Conclusion
While I have been a little harsher to this game than usual, especially a game I like, I do still recommend playing it.
For good dumb fun on your work break or long road trip, the game does what it needs.
But comparing Warframe to other ported games like Fortnite, more and more cracks begin to show.
Finally, the game has continued to be updated. I hope these updates will come around to quality-of-life changes like the graphics and UI to make this gaming experience worthy of rivaling consoles.
Thank you so much for the read, and as always, I’ll catch you guys in the next one.
