I started playing Warframe pretty recently. Well, sort of. I started playing Warframe past the introduction recently. I started playing it years and years ago, because one of my friends was really into the game, but I was getting into it as he was falling off it and I didn’t really have it in me to stay focused on the game by myself back then. I still don’t these days, but I’ve got a pair of friends (the same pair who got me into Palia and most other new games I’ve tried over the last year) who have been investing their time in the game recently and, since I’m more interested in doing fun stuff with my friends than the specifics of most games, I decided to launch myself back into it. Plus, this game gets around most of my aversion to guns in games since the enemies in this one are rarely human, melee attacks are my preferred mode of combat, and I can actually not use any guns at all if that’s what I want–for instance, I’m doing a Bow, Shuriken, Hammer thing right now and having a blast. I don’t really understand more than the very basics of whatever plotlines exist in the game since my friends have been powering me through the various advancement-critical missions so they can open up the world for me, reveal something they’ve been trying to keep a secret (which is working really well, aided in part by the fact that I genuinely don’t know enough to spot whatever stuff they might be trying to hide), and get me all of the cool abilities that usually take a long time to unlock. So I’m having fun but I’m also confused to the point of just sort of sliding through the missions without them leaving any kind of lasting impression on me.

This isn’t necessarily a negative thing, though. While I’ve heard good stuff about the game and about the storytelling it does, this has all come from a small selection of sources and the things they’ve said have convinced me that I probably shouldn’t look to this game for satisfying storytelling. Not that there isn’t good storytelling, only that it isn’t the true focus of the game. Given its place in the gaming world as a game similar in vein to Destiny and any other PvE-focused looter-shooter, I think that still makes it a much more interesting game than most. After all, I tried playing Destiny 2 for years and never really did figure out what was going on beyond the surface level. There was too much hidden lore and history confined to Destiny 1 for me to pick it up without diving into the wikis and the one time I tried to do that, I wound up with a migraine for the next forty-eight hours from staring at the tiny text on my monitor for too long. So my expectations were pretty low going into this game and while I can’t say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I’ve found, I can’t say I wasn’t unpleasantly surprised either. Thus far, the entire story has basically just flowed in one ear and out the other as I’ve had to focus on keeping up with my friends, learning how to not die when I’m massively under-leveled, and getting used to the mechanics of this incredibly glidey third-person shooter.

All that said, the surface level of this game is still fairly interesting. You play as something called a Tenno, which might be a manufactured being meant to protect the world from other manufactured beings, but that might be wrong since this represents my best guess so far. As far as I can tell, a Tenno is a ghost possessing a suit of armor called a Warframe and you can just swap those out whenever you want. Most of them are oddly gendered, complete with significant busts and hips, large pelvic protrusions, or incredibly unfortunate recreations of various genitalia in what would otherwise be a pretty cool looking frame. The rest are either ungendered bodies or weird little freaks that come in a couple flavors, namely “robes and drapery” or “collected bits,” all of which are my preferred Warframes, even though I rarely look at anything but the back of my model. Your job, in whatever form you prefer (and this game is all about letting you pick your form so long as you have either the money to buy it or the time and patience required to farm the things you need to slowly build it yourself), is to rid the local sector of space of all kinds of weird creatures that are… preying on the locals? Some of them are the locals, though, so it’s tough to tell why I’m fighting these people other than because the humans (well, the ones who look like modern humans, that aren’t clones or haven’t been trapped in horrible debt cycles requiring them to sell their body parts and labor to hopefully prevent their great-grandchildren from having to do the same) can’t do shit to save themselves. There’s also something about this other super advanced race (species?) of people who died out a really long time ago who maybe made all the manufactured beings but that’s okay because they fucked with time and you can sorta go hang out with them or their recently abandoned civilization if that’s something your mission requires. It’s all fine, though, because you get to be a super powerful fighter and wreck everyone’s shit while crouch-leaping across the map at incredible speeds.

That’s literally everything I know about the game and it’s still plenty of fun to play. I’m sure I’ll figure out more eventually, when I stop rushing through missions and have the time to go back and figure things out in a more orderly fashion (and actually play through the various locations on each planet that my friends are helping me skip), but for now I’m just rolling with it. It’s pretty satisfying to play and doesn’t yet have the incredibly boring grind of high-tier Destiny 2 play (though I’m willing to bet that I’ll find the grind eventually), but I’ll admit that I’m still not as up for high-pressure, fast-paced games as I used to be. I’m still too worn-down and exhausted to play anything that really requires that kind of focus and concentration (which is why I’ve stopped trying to play Armored Core VI and started replaying Final Fantasy 7: Remake so I’ve got save data to load into Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth ASAP), but I can usually manage a few hours of it each weekend before I feel myself need to go do something quiet for a while to recover. It’s fun enough for now, but not so much fun that it has passed into the “I’ll play it by myself” zone yet. Even though I really ought to since there’s a lot of stuff here that requires you to do it on your own and it would probably help move things forward if I took some time on a weekend to play through that stuff rather than make my friends wait for me to do it while we’re all online. I dunno if Warframe will ever click like Palia did but, for now, just having a good time with my friends is enough.