Firefall: Is It Worth Playing?

Firefall is a sci-fi game with an open world. In its core, it's a shooter game but it has so many RPG elements combined that it's hard to put it in the shooter genre. In my view, it belongs in both categories.

Red5 is the company responsible by Firefall and they're doing a good job with it. They're very responsive, adaptive and attentive to the community feedback. It entered closed beta in 2011, open beta in 2013 and was released July 29 of 2014. It already received a huge patch with a lot of needed changed in 19 August 2014. Good to see they're working fast!

Why dwell on that? Why not both?

It's undeniably a shooter. There's no denying it since every class consists of weapons and you basically just shoot at things! However, if you put aside the fact that everything is weapon related, you'll be playing a MMORPG. I mean, you need to level up, improve your gear, farm, craft, play the market, improve skills and place perks. These features are part of every MMORPG ever made, yet they're in Firefall too.

Ultimately, when you're playing Firefall, you can't shake the feeling that you're playing a RPG. The biggest difference is that you have a weapon that you shoot instead of spamming skills. Instead of forty, fifty skills like in World of Warcraft, you can choose from four skills to complement your shooting kit.

When i first heard of Firefall, the first thing that came up to my mind was, why didn't someone think of this first?

It's one of those ideas that should have been created a long time ago. A MMORPG where you shoot instead of spamming skills. It opened an unexplored niche, which sadly, won't grab the biggest player base, but hey, it's called a niche for something!

It may never grab the biggest audience but will always please to a decent niche audience. Despite the idea being great, in my view, it's hard to implement cool looking fights against monsters in a shooter since there isn't any flashy skills or something of the sort. On top of that, it's hard to create encounters that are skillful challenging to players in a game where you have to shoot monsters to death. Finally, since it's so player versus monsters oriented, it doesn't have what it takes to be a huge PvP E-Sports title.

I'm not dissing Firefall. It's just how it is, unless Red5 is able to pull something magical! However, i truly believe it's a great game and worth of playing, for niche players. I love it!

Firefall has many classes, which are called battleframes in the game. You start out with five battle frames available:

• Recon
• Assault
• Engineer
• Dreadnaught
• Biotech

They're the starting classes. There are two more for each type later on, making a total of fifteen battleframes. The system is different from the usual RPG though. In Firefall, every battleframe is linked to your character. Unlike others MMORPG, here you switch battleframe as you please and level them unlocking more perks between them. However, the only free battleframes are the first five. When you get your first battleframe to the max level, 40, you'll receive the chance to unlock one of the specialized battleframes. After that, if you want more, you need to buy them from the cash shop.

This is good for those types of gamers like me that i like to reroll constantly. Now, we don't need to create new characters! Just change the battleframe and off we go.

I'm still hoping for a more intuitive and complementing crafting system and i'm sure it will be in time. In every town there are computers, where you can leave the system crafting whatever you want. You need to research recipes and/or buy them from vendors. I do believe the crafting system needs to be redone, but it's still fun.

Also, in Firefall, in addition to farming monsters you can also mine, which brings monsters to you as well! There are minerals around the map that you can burst with a bomb that gives you said minerals. But, in order to do real mining, you go around the map scanning the ground for a good spot. After you find one, you call a thumper. What that thumper does is farm minerals from the ground while you get swarmed by monsters! You need to protect it for as long as you can. It takes 5 minutes i believe to fill it completely. In my opinion, they should boost the experience that you get from thumping. It's rather low, at the moment.

While you're out playing in the open world a ton of events spawn, which are good for extra experience. It adds a ton to the game play.

A shooter wouldn't be fun if there wasn't a ton of things to shoot at and that's what world events bring to the table. You're off questing or farming and a close event spawns, where people gather to prevent a swarm! Cities are attacked, random tornadoes that spawn monsters and shoot waves. They're awesome.

To top it all off, in the patch released yesterday they increased the amount of events going on. A well needed change!

Jobs are the quests of Firefall. There are terminals in every town that will give you jobs.

I had to complaints about jobs, and one of them was addressed yesterday. Firstly, the experience was too low. It was increased by a lot in the recent patch, awesomeeee! Secondly, it's the amount of walking. You need to go from A to B to C to D to E and it sucks so much time! But that's part of questing in every game, i guess.

In Firefall, there's also a campaign mode which adds to the role playing feel. Also, when you're doing jobs, you're always talking to your operator and the mission giver. You start to feel conformable hearing them and the game story is nice to follow.

It's enforced onto us, since you can't make them shut up, but the dialogues are so easy going and well done that it doesn't feel like it's being pushed down our throat.

It's pretty cool, actually.

There's a map, which consists of World PvP. It's a frenzy battle, while you try to conquer objectives, farm, etc.

It gives a Planetside kind of feel, if you know the game. Instead of killing monsters, you're killing players with your party and doing your stuff together, while fending off other players!

Like everything else wasn't enough, there's still boss fights!

This is where a group of players join forces to kill a massive monster, like others RPG! You can expect big loots and intense fighting with your friends!

This is where they make their bucks! It's refreshing to see a cash shop that isn't pay to win. The only things that you can in their cash shop, is ways of leveling up faster and unlock more battleframes. Also, cosmetics of course!

However, you can trade up in-game money for credits, which later can be turned into Red Beans that is the cash shop currency. So you can farm in-game and buy the things that you want if you don't feel like spending money. Awesome sauce all over it!

Finally, i'd easily recommend this game to anyone. If you aren't a shooter fan, you should try it anyway because at least it's something different. And it's action packed. Especially in boss fights or huge events.

The idea is fresh and is still in the works but Red5 is doing a great job of trying to make an awesome theoretical idea into something great!