Monday 10 December 2012

Hardly a Review: Firefall

So I've been on a bit of an MMO binge this past week, it’s been the penultimate open beta weekend for Firefall, so I finally managed to get a good look at the game. If you follow my twitter then you’ll know I've been trying to get my hands on it for the longest time, and I have to say, what little I've seen of it in the past 48 hours impresses me. Before we got any further, let me put this out there, this review is based on my very first impressions of the game, I don’t claim to know the game in intimate detail, I don’t claim that anything I talk about will be in the final release of the game, and I don’t claim my experiences will be the same as yours. If you disagree with what I have to say, or want to bitch at me, send it all care of Nosh cos I don’t give a good goddamn. Right, now that’s out of the way, to the review!

So the story behind the game, essentially we’re in the distant future where the world has solved it’s clean energy problems with the discovery of a new element called Crystite. That’s right folks, no shale gas here, if you’re gonna do it do it right. However, during the testing of an FTL drive powered by Crystite something goes wrong, and the resulting catastrophe (known as the Firefall) releases a tear in the fabric of spacetime known as the melding. This mutates wildlife and renders a lot of the planet uninhabitable, and also led an alien race known as the Chosen to Earth, where they launch an invasion. Wow... I mean only an idiot thinks shale gas is a good idea, but it never released some crazy alien race on us. Anyway that leads to the start of the game where your gang of mercenaries allies with what's left of Earth's government to force back the invasion and save the day.





In terms of the core experience, I want to compare this to the other MMO I've been playing recently which is Planetside 2. Now this might not seem like a fair comparison at first but just bare with me and I’ll explain. Both games attempt to redefine the idea of a modern MMO, and both go about this in different ways, Planetside goes straight back to square one and delivers a modern FPS, but Firefall doesn’t forget it’s heritage. Whilst it’s at it’s core a third person shooter, there are many features from traditional MMO's that will seem very familiar, such as resource gathering, crafting, questing, and that one guy who aggro's literally every mob and then runs straight into the middle of the quest hub. None of these things are present in Planetside 2 which seems extremely unstructured by comparison.

Graphically, the game isn’t anything special, it’s very reminiscent of TERA however it doesn’t quite reach the flair of Guild Wars 2. The character creation engine is embarrassingly basic for an MMO, and many times, the character models of the NPC’s look nothing like the anime inspired image of them that appears on the HUD, to hilarious effect. However this is all stuff I can look beyond, because the action develops so smoothly. The gameplay is much more reminiscent of action RPG’s and full on third person shooters; and unlike planetside 2, which went the full Call of Duty style FPS route, firefall still uses stats, experience, special abilities, and items for progression which ties it very securely to it’s heritage, the combination of the two styles leaves it very reminiscent of a certain game and it’s sequel I think you’ve all heard of. So yeah, the game kinda plays like a clunky version of Borderlands 2, but don’t take that as a downside, the gunplay is very smooth, and whilst movement and strafing seems to be a little on the slow side, similar to what you’d expect from Guild Wars 2 than Call of Duty, it doesn’t make you instantly vulnerable.

So one of the major pulls of this game, for me at least, was the fact that random events occurred during the course of the game, and you have the choice to run off and partake in a completely option mission. It’s sort of like a “since you’re in the neighbourhood” sort of thing. These missions vary from recovering an object, to defending a point, to killing some enemies, all standard MMO stuff however it makes the game seem much more fluid, and breaks up the typical MMO quest repetition. This is a feature I really haven’t seen in MMO’s so it set’s it out from the pack. (I’m sure there’s probably one game I’m missing) It’s the one feature I wish they had stolen and put in Planetside 2, although to be fair the entire concept of questing is absent from Planetside 2. It just shows that the Firefall developers are trying to move the goalposts of the standard MMO set-up whilst still keeping a recognisable and comfortable slant to an otherwise stale genre.

One important point I’d like to make about this game is that they weren’t joking around when they said it was an MMO, the more you progress through the early stages of the game, the more you come to realise there’s not an awful lot you can do on your own. At one point one of these random events popped up, and I decided to go check it out. I ended up running into a pack of enemies with automatic weapons and as much health as me. Needless to say, I didn’t last very long. Since I was playing on my own there wasn’t much I could do outside of avoiding these encounters, and I really did feel like I was missing a chunk of the game by doing this. So when the game hits release, make sure you dust off your little black book, apologise to your friends for whatever faux pas you’re inevitably responsible for, and get a group together. I can assure you the game will be a much more rewarding experience, and next time I boot the game up, I’ll have the hardly boys on standby.

One of the nice features regarding the randomly occurring events is that every so often, the chosen will decide to attack one of your settlements, I just so happened to run headlong into one of these attacks, and I got mullered like a fruit corner. I like this feature, the idea you have to secure and defend territory makes it feel like there’s a war going on, which was something I never felt from TERA Online, despite the fact that there was meant to be a war going on. The downside of this feature however (and this is probably because the server wasn’t as populated, and I was on my own) was that in running headlong into the Chosen, I was trying to complete a main story mission, which was taking place right in the middle of their encampment. This put a massive roadblock on what I could do, and I didn’t really seem like there was anyone around to take care of the problem. Whilst I think it’s a good feature, I think it’s balance need’s to be tweaked a bit in favour more of the players, at the time I was playing about 50% of the revealed map was red with Chosen, which doesn’t seem balanced to me at all, especially if it has an effect on early game progression. You can’t just go to the Winchester and wait for it all to blow over.

So after 48 hours with this game, I can tell you I was not let down. This is a game I can wholeheartedly recommend when it’s released, and since it’s free to play, my recommendation comes with zero risk. I’m not exactly sure how many hours of gameplay you could squeeze out of the game, and since I haven’t experienced the endgame I’m reluctant to comment, but I still have an aching feeling that this might just be a polite distraction rather than a hardcore “waste your life” MMO. Either way, check it out when it’s released in a few months time, and don’t forget to bring a posse.

I’m gonna go do some thumping.
Jamie out xoxoxo

PS When this game enters full release, we’re planning on recording our playthrough so you can see what the full co-op experience is like, so keep an eye out for it in the near future.

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