When I first started playing, back in early 2012, my first impression was overwhemingly positive. Although the progression system was quite close to the current one (level based gear with module slots), the game showed enormous promise to become its own "thing".
It started with 0.5, where the new tech tree involved a much more horizontal progression, which was less about inflating numbers and more broadifying your combat options. It also brought in a constraint system (fixed at the time), which forced you to make decisions about the gear you could equip. It sounds like a bad thing on paper, but it actually made you *think* about your character. You could decide exactly how to build it, how to specialize it. Your character was truly one you'd call your own.
Another milestone passed, and the tech tree was refined in a deep, complex crafting system while the character progression focused on constraints (which became upgradeable through gained experience and collected resources). As your constraints improved, you could equip stronger, better gear (bringing some vertical progression) while making sure you could never equip all of the top quality ones at the same time.
It was an ideal diagonal progression system, one that I sincerely hoped would stay for good.

As for the world, well... we were promised an open, sandbox-ish world that would evolve and change through the players' actions, and for a time we had something quite close.
Coral Forest used to be quite a dangerous place where watchtowers and other key points could fall to the Chosen any time if left undefended. Places like Sunken Harbor and Thump Dump could even be submerged by the Melding, and that had consequences, albeit temporary.
Still, we really had the feeling that the region was the last bastion of humanity surrounded by an implacable force from another world.
And most importantly, anyone could contribute to an event (ares missions, thumpers, melding tornados and so on...) and be equally rewarded regardless of his own progression.
Everyone mattered.
Everywhere mattered.
Every*thing* mattered.

So, what happened?

Well, progression is now back to being level-based with slottable gear and no constraints. The consequence is you don't need to care about your character, you just pile up level after, equip that white Gun'O'Pwn because it's better than your old purple Gun'O'Whack you picked up 5 levels ago, you see numbers inflate exponentially and it doesn't mean crap because your enemies' health increased by the same factor, you follow the same jobs over and over since they're all variant of kill/fetch/escort (Yep, there are escort missions. The kind that makes you ragequit 99% of the time).

The crafting system has been simplified to the point of being dumbed down, yet at the same time required several times more material grinding than before, especially when some components can only be gotten through the goodwill of the RNG.
Said RNG also govern the result of your craft, so you are not even sure if the result is what you want.

The old open world has been segregated into level-based areas, so players too high or too low for an ares mission, job or whatever would be penalized in the rewards gained (that's right, if you are a lowbie and want to try something challenging, you are screwed).
Virtually all of the 'chosen war' aspect have been taken out of coral forest. No invasions, no incursions, a few strike teams every once in a while... the "last bastion of humanity" became a dull, unchanging place.

With the release patch, the game changed from an innovative, off-the-beaten-track MMOFPS into essentially WoW with guns. It had a lot of promise, but instead went the generic, unimaginative way.

I regularly played this game for two years and enjoyed the hell out of it. I just don't any more the way it is now.

For people who never played the beta, you might enjoy it. You just wouldn't realize how good it could have been.

Updated 21st of Augst 2014: New patch, new changes. They've ramped the dynamic content up a lot. For all those complaints about being 'forced' to do Jobs to exp, Red5 responded. You can now go from 1-40 doing nothing but randomly spawned missions if you wanted to. These include things like Chosen drop pods, bandit ambushes, lockbox assaults and similar. They added the mobility to Assault many were asking for, and did a tuning pass on a lot of other frames to fix a lot of problems people were having. All in all the devs have been really responsive to the actual issues.

Of course you'll now see people on the forums complaining that the game is too hard now! All these enemies! We wanted a war not challenge!

All in all they've been doing an excellent job of polishing up what needs polish and adding in new events and trying to work up new live events for the players.

Updated the 9th of August 2014: I just wanted to update this a bit to say that the devs have remained constantly talkative in game, interacting with the community and answering questions and the like. I've gotten a chance to play with quite a few of the crew from Red5 and they are all pretty passionate people.

The forums for this game are turning into a pretty toxic mess, but in game I've seen nothing but positive changes as Red5 continues to try to iterate and get the game more polished. The first few weeks were pretty rough but I've got to meet a lot of cool new players who seem to honestly enjoy the game. Red5 seems to have a direction they want to go and seem to be following it much better then the kind of random experiments they were doing before. After yesterdays Firefall Live I have more faith in their ability to take feedback and data and move the game forward.

Just, you know, avoid the forums. It's pretty much the bottom half of the internet. If youtube and news articles have taught me anything its that you never read the bottom half of the internet.

I've been playing Firefall since near the beginning.

I want to make something clear for anyone who reads the negative reviews: They are horribly nostalgic. The 'constraints' system boiled down to 90% of the population using the same build (Max cooldown and jump jets) so they could fly around in circles and spam abilities without a modicum of skill. Regen was high and it was easy to make yourself literally invincible. The game was incredibly easy and no one wants to admit this because that'd ruin their rosey naval gazing.

On to the game we have now: It's bigger. The world is really well made and has a lot of interesting locations. The different frames all feel different enough to be noticeable. You can hit level cap in a week or less if you just pay a bit of attention to how you gain exp. Crafting currently is too overtuned in that the prices are sky high, but that'll probably get toned down. (Dev's have said they wanted to start high and go down because almost no one whines about having to spend less to build things.)

All in all its a really solid shooter with heavy RPG elements. There are really fun raids at endgame and the instanced dungeons that tell that main story are generally really fun. You can solo all of them (Well not the raid. At least not that I know of.) but they definitely shine with a group.

Also the assault class plays like a Tribes spinfusor soldier. Huzzah to that.

[Disclaimer: I downloaded the game just to write this review. I played it for 3 years, many many hundreds of hours I suffered it's buggy grind. No more. I just wish to prevent you from repeating my mistake.]
[Disclaimer#2: This review is LONG. TL;DR version is at the bottom of the review]

I am Megakoresh and this is my story in the game that set out to break the rules and ended up breaking only hearts:

In Novermber 2011 I have joined the beta for "Firefall" that was having all the right ideas for "fixing" the MMO genre, fixing all the things I hated it for. It also was coming up with a revolutionary method of development at a time - community-driven development was not nearly as widespread then.

Game started with a PvP component and sheduled tests twice a week. People would organize, play, provide feedback, the next patch the feedback was directly implemented and fully documented a to what was changed and why. When PvE launched in April 2012, this continued, the game was slowly improving leading up to the major patch in August 2012, when the game opened the cash shop. That patch and the systems that came with it was the biggest and the last long-term imrovement to the game. 2 years ago.

The signs that the game doesn't really know where it wants to be, of mismatch between features, of the lacking gameplay and shooter component, were subtle at first, but community, has picked up fast and warned the developers of the things they needed to work on. These larger warnings were ignored, but smaller suggestions were constantly being implemented, often without considering their "compatibility" with the game's design, but it pleased those who posted the suggestions and created this illusion that the "community-driven" development was still going on, even if by now it was in fact searching forums for issues and solutions that the developers already decided on, acting them out and then claiming it was "requested by community".

As time went by the development focused more and more on economy, [mostly vertical] progression, adding various stats and senseless enemies upon a barebones stat-driven gameplay system which meant any additional content was suffering from diminishing returns as far as gameplay is concerned. Any extra ability didn't matter because of 30 second cooldown, which, like most things in Firefall, absolutely doesn't fit the fast-paced, spammy combat. Any extra enemies were just extra-buggy reskins of already buggy current enemies and so on, you get the idea.

As time went by, the players, who signed up for a game that promised to be a true MMOShooter, started getting frustrated at the continued focus on the MMORPG grind, economy, progression treadmill and ignoring the gameplay, despite consntantly trying our best and spending a lot of effort on feedback, thinking that the developers still consider it with the game in mind, not their own personal biases.

Wasted effort and continued degradation of the game are sure ingredients for conflict and as the feedback started to be intertwined with [rather reasonable and polite] calling out the devs for them ignoring the feedback on the topics of gameplay and variety, we all have realised who Red5 really were, as they began aggressively defending their philosophies without (unlike the community's complaints) any evidence to back it up. This followed into more negativity from the community, which in turn has followed into.... censorship.

Yep, in a totally unexpected display of unprofessionalism, seeing that the threads and voices of the "veterans" and people who wanted the Firefall from 2011, were being heavily supported by the rest of community, Red5 went over and simply banned the people in question, including me, from the forums, where 99% of the feedback is discussed. Following that, as soon as people recognized my name on their devstream in the twitch chat, they immediately banned me from it as well.

After that they proceeded to keep making the same mistakes they were making ever since August 2012. These spanned across EVERYTHING in the game: from balancing:
Weapon X is hit-scan, fast firing, high damage per shot, designed for "skillful marksmen"; too OP. Options: make it projectile, >>reduce fire rate to increase skill level<<, nerf damage. They did: nerf damage. "Skilled marksmen" my ♥♥♥.

to resources:
Our resource system is too complex, but not deep enough. Options: nerf amount of resources and levels, increased the imprortance of comboing resources for different results to give players more freedom; ADD OVER 9000 RESOURCES FOR MAXIMUM INVENTORY SPAM!!!. Guess what Red5 did. And then they added inventory limits a year later because servers couldnt handle it. Pfft...

to enemies:
Enemies are too easy for leveled players, need to make them harder. Options: add more abilities to current enemies, add telegraphs, high damage attacks, area-buffing, make each enemy a threat and scale spawn compositions OR BUFF ALL THE HP!!!!. Guess what Red5 did.

In addition they highly encouraged fanboish behaviour; screaming and flaming on forums was not punished so long as it was in favour of the dev's point of view. One of the CMs tried his best to try and bring the old spirit back, to be objective and fair, but ultimately his efforts were in vain. Still, he was the only bright spot after Red5 showed their true colours, I hope he quits and finds a good studio to work in instead.

When you were just defending some stupid mechanic like death penalty (which isn't supported by this game at all, and you will see why as soon as you start playing), without insulting anyone, the devs would often "Like" your post, which you can guess what effect it has on a fanboi. The devs eventually hid visbility of "likers", just displaying their quanitity instead.

Eventually most of the older players got pissed off at being ignored, censored, screamed at by fanbois, and left. Those that tried to circumvent the game's grind through exploits after months of begging the devs to reduce the grind, were wiped and left too.

The game started dying and the devs started running out of money. So what did they do? Take a wild guess fellas. They started frantically implementing whatever 2 year old suggestions (that were screamed about to them over the course of the beta) they could implement in a short amount of time. But by this point it is much too late. The game was built upon a base design for a shooter with minor MMORPG elements, but the meat and most of the bones that were added in during the development are that of a traditional MMORPG grindfest.

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As a result you have a game that is an extremely repetitive and boring ability shooter, with abilities having 30 second cooldowns, adding nothing whatsoever to the variety (they scale down to 5 seconds, which in some cases makes it extremely OP, but it will require you to pay hundreds of $$$ or grind for hundreds of hours and babysit research for months to get to that cooldown).

It's jetpacks, freedom of movement and very lush colourful world coupled with excellent aesthetics and graphical fidelity will provide a high "WOW factor", until it blows off and you realise that the jetpacks are just tools for random bunnyhopping around, with that being the only reliable way to avoid damage. It's MMORPG elements are just as lacking, with a severe lack of content, buggy and grindy gameplay and enemies and the same boring "dynamic" quests, that have to be repeated thousands of times.

A ton of money, tears, wasted effort and broken promises; this game is a testament to the "Never believe in 'ideas'" rule of modern gaming industry. The community is nice though. One of the best out there, so at least that is not a lie. If you are going to play this game, it would be nice if you tried and keep that tradition. It is the only good thing about the game aside from it's looks.

I do recommend this game, but only because it's free to play, if you had to pay for it, I don't think it would be worth it.

This game is fun for a while, then it gets a little repetitive, then it gets REALLY repetitive.

In this game you're a battleframe pilot. In the beginning you can use the basic versions of 5 unique battle frames, they each level independently and though you only have to do the main story missions once, you can replay them all you like. Each basic battleframe has 2 or 3 unlockable advanced versions, these are unlocked either via cash shop, the player-run market with ingame currency, or using pilot tokens from leveling another frame to level 40 (max level).

The problem is that there isn't a very large variety of things to do, even at the start, there are about 4 different types of random events around the map, there are a few (not nearly enough) area missions you pick up at the bulletin boards in town, or main missions. After you outlevel the area you're in, you move onto the next one. There'll be some different monsters/people to kill, but essentially it's all the same.

The even worse problem is that you have to do this for any battleframe you use... There's no different story, no different events or missions, or quests... So essentially you'll do the same thing (which in the beginning is exciting but it only lasts at most a matter of weeks.) over and over again for as many battleframes you want/have.

Having friends in the game to play with only prolongs it so far.

It's a fun game for the first couple of hours that you play it, while you're getting accustomed to the world of the game. Then some of the harsh realities start to hit you.

The game starts you off by allowing you to choose one of several basic classes, like Assault, Dreadnaught, Recon, etc, and upon reaching level 40 (max level) with any of these classes, you are given 10 pilot points to unlock an advanced version of the class. Herein lies one of the game's irritating problems. The grind becomes very, very annoying. It's just continual back and forth between Job Boards, with a few world events thrown in like crashed LGVs or thumpers. It would be fine if it was fun, but once you do it a couple of times, the missions get extremely repetitive and tedious. One of the annoying ways the Job Board missions can make life hell for you is by forcing you to travel long distances back and forth, and if you don't have an LGV (a type of vehicle) or your glider is on cooldown, it becomes very tedious. Yes, I understand the developers need to make money somehow, and this is clearly a way to make people consider buying an LGV, and that's fine, I just don't like it and I'm warning others.

Unlocking advanced frames is extremely, extremely grindy for a new player that hasn't been in the beta for a long time and already has everything unlocked. Say you pick Recon as your starter class, and you want to unlock one of its advanced classes, the Nighthawk. Unless you straight up buy it with Red Beans (the premium currency), or from the Community Market with credits (another premium currency, you convert between the regular currency crystite <> credits, and credits <> Red Beans; it's not easy to obtain the large amounts of credits needed by exchanging crystite), you're going to have to first go through the grind of leveling up your Recon to maximum level, and then once you've unlocked your Nighthawk, you're going to have to start the leveling process all over from the beginning to level that up. If you want to unlock any other class, now you have to level up the Nighthawk to level 40, etc. etc. Simply put, it's extremely, extremely grindy.

If that wasn't all bad enough, that's just grinding with classes. The grind you have to go through regarding crafting is another pain.

I will say playing some of the classes themselves are fun, but the process of getting to play any of them properly is nowhere near fun.

EDIT: In fairness to the game, I will say that they have done a nice job designing the actual world itself. The graphics look very nice most of the time (unless you get close to any rocks in the game, my god those are ugly). Using gliders and the LGVs feels nice, it's just the process of getting there that's a huge pain. The game's soundtrack was also very nice to listen to.

FireFall have delivered many great things since it was first released (closed alpha) and I can only say the game can be insanely fun, unlike other MMOs FireFall feels a little different, it's a game that you can hardly compare to other MMOs, which is good.

Here are some of the positive things that make FireFall outstanding.

- Random Events. (Randomness is the main reason this game feels different and it is the feature that makes it insanely fun to play)
- Graphics. (It is not realistic, it stays closer to Borederlands style than reality, which gives the whole game a better feel, more smoother and relaxing feel)
- Design. (The World is very nicely designed, with places that won't make you wish to never go back to, instead, it is something you don't mind to visit thousands of times)
- Enemies. (The enemies in this game reminds me to Borderlands, every single enemy looks awesome and well designed. While some are cute and fun to squash, others are cool and badass "I'm looking at you Terrorclaw!")
- Chosen attacks/wars (Invasion aint here yet. The game is capable of showing from tens to hundreds of enemies at once, making these Chosen attacks/wars an experience you don't get in any other MMO, fighting against an army of enemies is more fun than anything I've ever experienced in MMOs, it's like you are in a LoTR battle)
- Battleframes (frames are your armors and each class has a different armor. These armors are for 1. look awesome and for 2. are paintable, they are not completely customizable, but you can still put on a different jetpack or a reactor on your back)
- NOT PAY 2 WIN (Yes, it is extremely rare to see a F2P game that is not P2W in any form. FireFall is completely free, there is in game curreny "red beans", but everything you can buy with them can be acquired in game for free)

Now, here are all the negative things that bothers me.

- Playing Alone. (FireFall was intended for Coop, like any other MMO and solo players will suffer the same thing with this. The game is fun for solo too, but if you play nonstop, then it will become repetitive after a week or so)

These are bad changes that only early beta/founders feel as negative, it won't change the gameplay for new players.

- Nerfing. (These devs like to nerf classes and when they nerf, they give hell, so it is hard to love 1 class for a very long time, if it gets a nerf the next month, cuz the best thing about it is getting too common)
- Lack of Random Events. (Random Events are in it and are awesome, however, back in early beta, there were Random Events at every 100m, giving the player unlimited fun, but then they reduced the number of random events and now you only see a couple in a big area)
- Nerfed Chosen Army. (Back in early beta, when there was an attack of chosens, the fight took well over 30min, everytime the chosens attacked, it felt like you are fighting the battle of the century, the legendary epic super awesome battle for humanity, those Chosens were FEARED by players, but then they got nerfed, yes that hell nerf, and now chosen attacks can be done in 5-10min, chosens' power were also nerfed, they are now just another enemy, not feared, not hated, forgotten...)
- No Chosen Controlled Areas. (As I said before, back in the days, it was really hard to win a fight against the Chosen army and the game system is that the chosens can take over bases and watchtowers. Everytime I logged in I saw at least 3 bases/watchtowers taken over by chosens and I always went there and tried to take over the base/watchtower with like 20-25 other players, it was like an Epic LoTR battle, but after the devs nerfed the Chosens, everything went down, I havent seen a single base or watchtower taken over by Chosens ever since the nerf...)

All the negative changes are something that is bad for founders and early beta players, but for new players, those are things that won't bother much... so those things won't affect your gameplay, if you havent experienced them in the early beta/alpha.

I still have a damn good time in FireFall and this game got more potential than most of the MMOs out there. If you have read this and feel that you should not play it, even tho I praised the game like it was a diamond in the MMORPG genre, then still, definitely give it a try, you will like it and you might love it.

Finally, I know I pointed out many negatives, but the positives were all something that can only improve gameplay and the negatives are something that can be brought back into the game anytime.

9.5/10

Good Free game and surely, not Pay-to-Win. You can actually enjoy leveling your character in-game, with or without the help of others. But the community is very helpful if you know how to ask.

Great soundtrack, cool sound effects, beautiful graphics (if you got a decent PC setup).

The action might get linear after getting your first 40-level Battleframe, but after that it get more easy to enjoy all that happens around you.

Like the game description says: "... constantly changing world, deep narrative, endless customization, and rewarding player progression, Firefall will consistently deliver spectacular content that will please both PvE and PvP players", i guarantee it to be true.

I have been playin Firefall for almost 2 years now, from Closed Beta to now in Open Beta. Firefall been through a lot, but is finally coming to a release, im happy for this, and with this release we will get a lot more playable zones and more content and bosses and raid instances to shoot stuff in :)
The world is beautifull, and combat is/feels epic. Best shooter i have ever been playing.
And most fair free to play game out there ( No pay to win )

heres my video playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdDImNZeyuTXWp41j-UsH7tP3O6uRVpA4

I cant wait to see how well Firefall will do once released to public as a finished product, but be nice to my baby :)

/Fanboi out

A lot of the thoughts in the negative reviews are 100% correct - This is sub-standard MMO, questing fare. Get the quest, walk, collect or kill, return, repeat.

However, there's something to it. The multiple abilities, the various characters, the movement with jump-packs. There is something here.

I thorougly loved Borderlands, and there are striking similarities (a bit too similar in parts), but this game certainly has the base for something bigger. I'm only level 8 at the moment, but will certainly be making it to 40, and putting some money into the game for the XP boosts.

I'm conflicted, but I'm having fun.

Review and tips focused towards new players, i am a beta player with over 2 years test experience in this title.
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First off, you need to know that this 3rd person shooter is also a MMO experience, so keep in mind you need to grind levels and components, a lot of time is needed to play this game, and with how the system works (and a good point i might add) is that you cant just sit there and leech from other people, you physically need to participate to gain XP and credit. So be prepared for a long-lasting (but awesome) experience so long as youre someone who enjoys actually playing the game and not just ya know..sat leeching from someone or not giving a crap.

***Gameplay: 7 / 10
The content is good, the single player missions are good, the different variations of World events and randomly generated content work great! The only problem is, there's not enough different types of mission and it can quickly become repetetive, which goes the same for story missions, theyre enjoyable but there just isnt enough of them (yet). I highly recommend playing with friends especially if they can give you a ride, or (i highly advise) you puchase with Red Beans of ingame Credits, a BIKE. Without a vehicle this game is a looong walk simulator, but as soon as you get a vehicle and craft yourself a lot of 1-use glider pads this mobility problem goes away (it sorta forces you to get a vehicle, but thats ok they need to make money somehow to sustain these big servers).
PvE Content is very well balanced and challenging, if you charge into a base full of bandits or chosen at your level, expect to get yourself killed very quickly as especially the Chosen, are a force to be reconned with. PvP is promising but ultimately, there's no balance and its only fun for the few. The classes you are allowed to play cover all the basic roles (tank, support, healer, dps etc) and the advanced battleframes (which i recommend Bastion, Dragonfly/Recluse, Raptor/Nighthawk or Mammoth for new players as these currently seem the most powerful) grant even further power to your class.
They have confirmed, and are adding a lot of content in the future including a level cap rise with (confirmed) at least 2 new world-zones, so expect a LOT of good things for this free-to-play title.

***Sound: 7 / 10
The music feels very gripping with its orchestral quality and all weapons sounds great, you really feel the oomph of your weaponry and explosions from afar you can almost feel the vibrations from. Sound quality is excellent! Though the roaming music can sorta make you a bit sleepy. The musical score is wonderful in missions and cutscenes but the roaming music is too boring. The game's vocal content and all NPC's (and quest givers) is about 97% fully voice acted! Some of those accents though are not very well spoken, and may sounds a bit cheesy, several of the voice actors seem uninterested but overall, sound is good.

***Graphics and worlds: 5 / 10
The maps look average and the systems overal graphics are well toned (character style inspired from Street Fighter 4). I wouldnt call firefall next-gen, its sorta in between last gen and next gen. It's optimized enough to run smoothly including in huge fights of 40 players and a hundred enemies at once on the screen (which is amaaaaziiiiing) but GPU Temperatures can run a little high so i highly recommend turning a few things down (shadows low or off, and antialiasing off unless your computer is an icecube). The worlds although they looks pretty, (gunna be honest here) will p### you off, as every obstacle, every mountain with no climbable surface, every tree/rock/nook and granny and just how lumpy the ground is, seems to do its utmost best to slow you down and hinder your ability to go someplace, which is why they sell glider-pads in game to make money off of you. Because of the terrible pathing in maps and how it fights and pushes you to the point of frustration when youre trying to be in a rush to go someplace, it heavily impacts this rating. The maps by design are agonizing.

***Overall: 7 / 10
There's a lot of potential here, keep in mind you DO have to spend some money if you want to get anywhere near end-game here because of long distance traveling and the advanced battleframes being stronger (mostly), but with the extra content coming, the community being really supportive of Firefall, and the playerbase being really co-operative and nice in game, i highly recommend this title.
Remember, it's free-to-play, but if you want to get serious about this game, you will need to spend a little money OR, spend a lot of time. Recommended: Get a vehicle, unlock the class you really want to play, tryout a 100% XP boost to get out of the first 10 boring levels and BOOM! You got yourself a really fun game, with great PvE experiences, and a solid future.

Oh my god. Shockingly news that it is on steam! Well as a closed beta tester, This game sure have come a looooong way. It is a truly Open World MMO mhm. As well as its unique style of using abilities like in MOBA MMO's having an ultimate. Fun thing about is the JumpJets which makes you able to hover towns and climb the roof tops. It seems they added new areas! I'm looking forward to explore more areas! :') Can't wait!

Firefall has a personality disorder. Its centerpiece is supposedly a world war between a besieged humanity and a superior alien civilization, but players spend most of the time roaming around engaging random clumps of indigenous bandits, mining for resources, and killing mutated fauna. There is a lack of sense about the relevancy or urgency of the war.

Leveling mechanics, itemization, crafting, and questing systems are conventional and unremarkable. Narratives conveyed in missions are discontinuous, because the missions themselves are randomly sequenced. The encounter system is simplistic: most scenarios reduce to close-range engagements as enemies materialize into existence near you. Enemy AI is mediocre: No squad tactics, no flanking, no suppression, no cover. Combat is mostly reduced to jumping and backpedaling away from enemies. It becomes less about surviving enemies, and more about surviving the point-blank splash damage from your own weapons.

Play it for the eye candy and esthetics, and for the easy adrenaline. Look elsewhere for more filling and better execution. Intelligently challenging PVE battles, cohesive narratives, and a world story that invites urgency elude Firefall at this time.

(Sorry about this long post, I really wanted to get the thoughts across, tried to space it out so you can see key areas)

My personal experience: I've been playing Firefall's beta for about 2 years now (it's beta has been on for around 5 I've learned), I was hyped ever since I believe paxeast when it was revealed. I jumped on board the list, and a few months later, got in. I'll tell you, was a very new experience from that very beginning, and it has changed A LOT since then. From gameplay, to rpg elements, to crafting, to missions, to being Esports to now focused on PvE (which from my perspective was great idea, cause pvp isn't my cup of tea), and how you're introduced to the world. I almost want to say that first major year of PvE they had was part of their progressing story idea. They have an entire new area now that was "captured" by players a few weeks ago (of this posting). I've spent many hours on this, then took a break for a few months for them to work out a few more things, cause was getting very complex and broken, especially crafting and items. But hearing them finally annouce a launch, I had to come back and see the changes, and boy was I impressed.

Class explanation: They went back to some classic rpg elements with their twists. A full level 1-40 system each with a white, green, blue, purple rarity system. Note that each class, battleframe, will start at level 1, even if you unlock the next "tier" of a frame. The 5 main frames are assault (blow ♥♥♥♥ up with a cannon, no seriously, a plasma cannon), dreadnaught (my fav, the tank, and mower of enemies), biotech (new version of medic, which yes isn't fully heal spec), recon (sniper), and the engineer (the engineer... it's a great frame, turrets and support stations). Now each has their own unique abilities and perks that you unlock as you level from 1-10, only 3 or 4, but they work so well that you wouldn't want more, tho you are able to take teir 1 abilities to their teir 2 version, which spreads to two difference classes each for a total of 10 new frames after tier 1. So that's basics, I'd recommend messing around with all before choosing main "class" and then their next tier.

Story: Now about the story. Co-written by Orson Scott Card... that's right, creater of Ender's Game is helping write the story to Firefall, and boy does it deliever. A semi-typical apocalypse story... actually the only typical about it is the word apocalypse. The "Firefall" was started by a asteroid circling around earth, causing all the satelites to fall to earth, causing mass chaos and civil wars and near world wars for resourses to survive. That was until the asteroid finally crashed into earth, destroying japan (japan is just the worst place to live in btw), and someone looked at the crash site, finding the new element crystite. With it's discovery, humanity's power came back, and it's structure jumped our technology. We unified under the United Nations of the Accord We then wanted more, and found it's origin on the planet Alpha Prime. Sending ships took 7 years back and forth (that's 14 total so you understand the math), actually some ships even longer, so we experimented with crystites power to "fold" space. Thus the Arclight was built. A massive ship, a dreadnaught to the Accord fleet, with it's Arcfold Drives was preparing to test this new technology, and change humanity forever... in all the wrong ways. As the jump was "complete", it failed, and tore a hole in space. The Arclight crashed into Forteleza Brasil, killing everyone who lived there... but the worst to happen was what emmerged from the tear... The Melding. A purple cloud of energy that destroyed and morphed our world. The melding covered everything, and anyone caught in it was killed or worse turned into humanoids known as The Chosen, who now hunt the remnants of earth's population. The only thing stopping the melding from eating everything, was the arclight's drives still functioning... for 5 years, everyone has been scavaging to survive. Mining crystite from earth's soil, and the Accord fighting off the chosen, but it wasn't enough.

Our Role: This is where we the player come in. We are the ARES Initiative, mercenaries hired by the accord to do the jobs the Accord can't do alone. They give us a battleframe and send us off into the world. Fighting back, chosen, the morphed wildlife, and even bandits as we all know, people get greedy and desperate near the end. There is much lore within this game, and an amazingly detailed world full of verticality, as you are given "jump jets" to climb higher areas. So explore, mine, craft, hunt, and become the ultimate badass as you discover the secrets of the chosen and the threat they pose, corperations fighting each other, and the threats of this altered earth have to offer you.

I'm loving where this game is going and has gone, it's still a bit buggy and needs work here and there, but otherwise, try it out, it's free, why wouldn't you? You don't need to even feel bad about never spending a dime on their game :)
Though believe me, you'll find something you'll like. I've also only scratched the surface of content in my review, cause there is a bunch. I've labeled about.... maybe 1/8th to 1/10th of the game really. Seriously, come join when you can.

Edited: Didn't realize I'd get a bunch of views. I feel like I should say more. I realized I didn't say any disclaimers, though the game being free to play kinda throws those out right? not really... with that said. This game is going for AAA graphics, and indeed it delievers, meaning you'll need a fairly powerful machine. I'm using a Nvidia GT 555M, so you realize that my computer is way behind it's time, though 6 Gbs of RAM and an i7 cpu help. However, the game still runs great, runs near 30 fps on low/medium graphics with a few times dropping to, and even then the game still surpasses in graphics. The game will give you a warning in the login if you have below recommended hardware.

Also, gameplay may feel a bit... repetetive, because most missions are kill a certain amount then collect and item, or find a person and escort them, the typical missions in all MMOs. However, there are other missions that randomly spawn on the map, such as turning off a bomb, which requires you to find keys and put them in at the correct time. While also being attacked left and right by enemies. Though I think what this game excells at that most free-to-play games fail at, is that the combat is fun. It's great to unload hundreds of bullets of your machine gun, or blast them apart with your plasma cannon, or blow enemies away with your abilities. It's simple, but competative, and just enough of a challenge that will keep you moving around dodging enemy fire or claws. I've died plenty of times, I've run out of ammo on my main weapon even more (which is why your secondary is near unlimited ammo), these enemies are pretty smart (though I'd argue a little more work can be done to make them perfect) and they find many ways to kill you or ruin your objective.

So again I'll say, this game still needs work. I will say it's at a launch stage, and the more people discovering it and finding all the bugs will help the developers even more. By the way, these guys listen to you. I haven't had as good customer support as from Red5. Every time I sent an email with requests and bug finds, I'd get a personal email from them, I've even got into some nice conversations with them. Now of course not all my requests were met, as they shouldn't be. They have their idea to this game and we shouldn't mess with that... too much. They have met their goal of launching the game they wanted, and they only want to add more for us.

Again this is where we come in, the more we play, the more invested they're in. The more the community grows, the more fun they'll have making. So just try the game, it won't hurt you, and you might actually come to love it like I do.

A study in game design theory, Firefall is a title that is fantastic on paper and mediocre in practice. Most of what's present is forgivable, but the primary attraction is ultimately its biggest liablity. Ultimately, it won't appeal to MMO fans due to it's watered down questing and pve mechanics, and action fans will dismiss it due to a lack of refinement.

Firefall's story revolves around the discovery of meterological elements that allow us to build fantastic technology, such as jet pack suits, advanced weapons, and space ships. The goal of traveling to an Earth like planet is foiled by further plot mechanics, as the ship crashes into Earth, rendering most of the surface uninhabitable. The obligitory aggressive alien species comes to Earth to take over, and this sets the stage for blah blah blah.

Poorly written sci fi tropes doesn't compel a player to continue on with the story, so the game heavily relies on the action elements. These are where the biggest problems manifest, because the actual meat of the game is mediocre at best. The game has a one to one action component, which is unusual for MMO's as it's a genre that caters to point and click, but Firefall tries desperately to stand out. Instead it feels like a mechanically stripped down shooter with very little to differentiate itself from the hundreds of other FPS games, and strapping a jet pack to your character does very little to help.

The actual physics of flying feel so static and boring that it really shouldn't have bothered. Instead of using it as a method to travel quickly from place to place, it simply allows for altitude adjustments, and has very little “skiing”, something that the tribes games were lauded for. Strategically, it's still important for melee centric enemies as you'll jet above them and shoot as they attempt with great futility to nibble your ankles. If an inertial effect was added to the jetting the game would be a pleasure, especially with the varied terrain. As is, moving from point A to B in the game is a chore.

Production values crush what enjoyment could have been gleaned from the rest of this game, as the graphics, sound, interface, and general design are adequate, but that's it. The view distance for terrain, monsters and allies is good, but up close they look pretty meh. This is in no small part due to an unusual cartoonish design, somewhere between Borderlands and World of Warcraft, but nowhere near as endearing as either. It comes off as generic and unexciting, with little if anything unique about it. Enemy design suffers the most, as it isn't just dull, it only has a handful of variations. In about 3 hours of gameplay, I had seen the same arachnid design used for about half the enemies, and zombie like enemy soldier for the other. From the sound of a machine gun to rockets firing, to my commander speaking to the lowly civilians, everything sounds awful. The voice acting especially is cringe worthy, with the theater commander taking the prize for most obnoxious line delivery this year.

Potential is squandered on a regular basis in the gaming industry, but rarely had expectations been so high; a 1 to 1 action mmo with jetpacks, a pvp component, and a free to play model. All that's left is an excellent case study in how design doesn't necessarily equate to execution. Firefall isn't terrible, it's just a really basic, stripped down action game that just happens to have an MMO component tacked on. Both are incredibly basic and unrefined, and leaves very little to entice fans of either genre. In the end, it really isn't worth your time unless major improvements are made.

Let's start with the bad since that's probably the first thing many people will notice before they can adequately give it a chance: this game is a buggy mess. At one point in my first week of playing the social network went down for about an hour or so, so there were no squads, no local chats, no zone chats, no private chats. That was...interesting for an MMO. Also count in the sheer amount of times youll have to /rui or simply relog on the game and it's easy to see more than a few problems with this "new" release. One other thing I wasn't particularly impressed with was the voice acting. Some of the higher 'brass' sounds like little more than some doughboy CS developer-type guy. Some of the voice acting simply sounds LAZY, where you expect the person you're reporting to to at least SOUND like he/she commands some sort of air of authority. Additionally, more than a few of the accents sound forced. OK so fair enough, this game didn't cost me anything to download but spacetime. Despite the issues, this game has a LOT of redeeming qualities and so now we'll move on to why I recommend it.

While the level cap is low for an MMO (currently only 40; I've gotten a little more than halfway there at this point in time), Red 5 offers within Firefall a world lush with touristic scenery (the first town, Copacabana, is similar to an island vacation destination), Borderlands-esque graphics (cell-shading) and gameplay, and random bad guys including oversized bugs (giving it a Starship Troopers kind of feel at times), various rebel factions, and a cult of sorts that goes by the name of the Chosen. In this world, the "Melding" has descended after a massive semi-apocalyptic event called the "Firefall", spawning the Chosen and as an ARES mercenary it's your inevitable destiny to push this purple tyranny back into the shadowy depths from which it came. As someone who just hit their 20's in game, I don't know if there's ever an overall resolution towards this problem but I'm sure having a good time getting to that end point.

As you level up, there are several towns for almost every level range so location diversity is never really a problem. Each of these towns has it's own job board which supplies you with a set of level appropriate gopher/defense missions to help you level. There's also a main string of campaign quests that you steadily unlock as you level up that add to the story of the war against the Melding. In some of these missions you actually push the melding back by activating a SIN Uplink in the area (so THAT's what those are for!).

In your time spent playing Firefall, there are several other things to do if you don't like the mainstream find/grind missions. Several random missions occur in your local area, ranging from melding tornados (around level 15-20 it seems are the lowest ones you can find) that you have to spend some time shooting down to random LGVs and Thumpers crashing down in your area which you can save for a decent chunk of xp and resources. Sometimes Chosen dropships like to pay visits to SIN Uplinks in towns or at watchtowers and attack/take them over, after which it's team ARES' responsibility to liberate and take back the area.

Using Thumpers in itself is another gem of this game's overall existence. Yet another choice while exploring the world is to scout out mineral nodes that randomly spawn throughout. Find a node, call down your thumper, and prepare to defend it for the next 5 minutes while it mines resources for you and bugs are trying to destroy it. A successful thump gets you xp and resources based on the % of the minerals present in the area you're thumping. An unsuccessful thump sees your thumper destroyed, but that's OK! You can just craft another one!

Crafting is one area of the game that seems a bit overwhelming at first, but it actually ends up fitting into the game quite nicely for those higher teens and lvl 20+ areas. Almost everything you pick up is salvagable, which gets you research points, crystals, and refinable materials that can later be used in crafting.

Mobility EARLY game is KIND of an issue, but not really. For the most part you'll be walking around everywhere until level 25 when you get a reusable ground vehicle, but there are some alternatives. 1-use ground vehicles drop from quests and I believe they're also craftable if you so desire. In addition to the possibility of ground vehicles you have the entire hang gliding system which is it's own source of entertainment, not to mention a much quicker way to get places. I especially enjoy climbing the highest mountains (there are achievements for climbing these mountains as a matter of fact) and spawning a glider pad to fly off of them. Some of these mountains literally make it possible to fly clear across a region from one side to the other, just don't fly near the Arclight! :D

As far as replayability is concerned, you don't have to ever create a new character if you don't want to. All the different classes are separated by what are known as "battleframes" in game, which one can change not unlike a shirt or some other equippable article of clothing. Now, each time you equip a new frame you haven't played before it starts at level 1 but all the early missions are replayable for xp/resource credit. I should also mention that starting out as a free player you only get access to the 5 different accord frames, which are the basic frames in each of the 5 different battle classes. Here's the beauty of this particular free2play game, though: you don't ever have to spend a dime of your real money in game to get everything there is to get, it might just take a while longer. There is always the option of buying stuff for those that are impatient and want to try out some of the elite frames sooner rather than later, like me. Bought Electron and Bastion on the first night.

All-in-all, I do recommend this game. It has a lot of potential. It's very engaging; the gameplay is moderately-paced and 3-dimensional based in a wide-open world. Listening to the soundtrack is often pretty relaxing. This game also does have PvP, though I've spent next to no time exploring that particular venue cause there's so much other fun stuff to do in PvE that, quite refreshingly, doesn't seem so repetitive. Even the campaign missions you unlock changes up the scenery and the objective in each one so it's not simply a generic mission formula. It's obvious they took some time to plan the campaign missions out. Now if only they'd spend the time to make sure that some of my local town job quests didn't get stuck loading the next objective or that I'm at least ALWAYS able to invite my friends to quest with me in a squad (I will not forget that ONE experience, but to any potential players reading this, it was just the ONCE).

Try this game if you like F/TPS, cooperative gameplay, and a decent story line.

Love this type of MMO. Sci fi setting. Lots to do alone or together in a squad.
Do missions that just pop up around on your map. Or go to the job board and see what is
available there.
Chose the frame you like best, craft the weapons the way you want them to be.
Trading, minerals thumping and more fun to be had ! :)

Firefall combat is great and super fun. The world is pretty, sometimes I just login for chatting and messing around, Now I can't wait for the newly added zones, and new stuffs. Last but not least, the community is awesome,

Long time player, since early closed beta i supported the game in hopes it would change. But in all honesty it has not. All the money we used has gone to pay for there youtube channel staff do sing a longs, to there 3 GM's doing a livestream taking 5 mins to talk about the game then using the other 45 mins of the time they are getting paid to work talking about useless post about the community. (showing other players off) he gameplay itself is ok and fun, but the game is a grindfest, and gets boring really fast. A few bug fixes have been implemented for example removing the enemies aimbot system which in beta they announced it was how the enemies were suppose to behave, to a few market and UI glitches. But the game now that its release STILL has many bugs, and is not polished at all. I do not recomend this game, being a veteran player of the game. The only feature that i have not seen break in this game is there RMT system, which if it did it would be fixed asap unlike the other bugs in the game. I honestly do not know what they are doing with the money they are recieving from players but, this game is still a beta. Passing by the forums, ive read players complety disagree with other reviewers about the game. Take mine to heart, being a closed beta player to launch, and any other honest players review. Becuase now they the "Fanboys" of the game are reading and downvoting most honest reviews. Try it out yourself and you be your own judge.


Thank you for your patience.
Best,
Rundas~

The beta builds for Firefall in 2012 were so much better than this current build, and by that I mean around Aug/Sept/Oct time; cuase I didn't really get to play the beta as much as I would have, since something happened to my client, it's wouldn't run or even uninstall. I didn't get to play Firefall again till it was on steam a week or so ago.

They took most, if not all, the fun out of this game. The areas are level based now, I remember being able to roam the whole map just about. The random events are gone as far as I can see. No more invasions by the melting or chosen, I remember watchtowers being attacked all the time, and random invasions here and there; don't see any happening now. The crashed thumpers and LGV's are still here, but seem to be fewer than before to me.

Then there's the crafting and reaserch. There wasn't any research when I was playing beta. I don't mind it, but they put in TOO much; it needs to be combined and have AT LEAST 50% of it cut out. Either that or make a lot of other ways to get reaserch points other than savalaging, or reduce the points costs as well. And what happened to all the minerals? There's nothing but sand/dirt and iron now that I found around the starting area, there used to be at least a third mineral too around the starting area.

I also remember a horizontal skill/gear/weapon tree that you got a point (or whatever) to spend on every level up for a frame; that was option based, as in every level of the tree had at least two choices (such as between two weapons, a weapon or skill, booster/gear item or something else, and etc.) and you could always wait another level to get the second (or other choices) if you wanted both (or all). There was also a particular "upgrade" path to advanced frame 1 or advanced frame 2, so you could get to an better frame quick if so wanted, or both advanced frames.

And there's durablity now, and for EVERYTHING? Wasn't in the beta and we don't need it.

I'd really like to know wtf happened to this game, it was so much better in the beta when I played it. Which is usually the opposite of betas/games I've played, usually the beta sux more so then the release for a game; but not this time, firefall beta was much better then released firefall.

First played the game 2-3 years back and had a blast. Came back when Open Beta started and have been playing for almost everyday. Absolutely amazing shooter experience. Can't recommend it more.