Red 5 Studios' ambitious free-to-play MMO-meets-shooter Firefall is a game that "makes you work a lot for very little," so said Phil in his 2014 review. Back then he added: "The repetitive churn of missions and activities further spoil an only occasionally entertaining shooter."

Add Phil's words to middling reviews across the board, poor performance, studio layoffs, and the ultimate departure of CEO Mark Kern and it seems Firefall's fate was written on the wall. Despite money, big budget marketing and the suggestion of an in-development but as yet absent PS4 version, today marks its final day of existence on PC. 

Before turning its attention towards mobile, Red 5 Studios posted the following statement on its website:   

"With heavy hearts, we regret to inform you that after much review and analysis, Red 5 Studios have decided to suspend the Firefall efforts on 7th, July 2017. Thank you for being an important part of the Firefall experience and for your loyalty and dedication to the online community.

"Your efforts and loyalty will not go without recognition, however. Firefall is currently developing a mobile version of the game and all of Firefall’s founders and players will be rewarded greatly in the new game. We will be sure to provide everyone with more updates as we have them.

"Thank you for your support and enthusiasm throughout the years; we will see you at the next battle."

So there you have it. Firefall, as we know it, has been extinguished.

Firefall? More like Biofall. Er, by which I mean the newly released Firefall patch adds elemental weapon modifiers, letting your guns rain down biological as well as thermal destruction. There's electricity, plasma and laser types, too, but Electrofall doesn't really work. It's a massive update, and a new video runs down just some of what it includes.



In addition, the world is being populated with more events and encounters. New dynamic events will bring Chosen death squads and "loot pi atas", and the Kanaloa the Destroyer boss has been upgraded for a new "hard mode" instance. There's also a new live event. In Codename: Crossfire, Chosen will spawn around the world to be taken down for new achievements and rewards.

You can see the full patch rundown here. It's a big list, but then, Firefall was a game in need of a lot of changes. As I explained in the review, it's a game that sits awkwardly between MMO and shooter. There's little that couldn't be improved, though, and so it's good to see that major changes are happening.

Firefall is a free-to-play MMO shooter with an emphasis on dynamic events, skill-based combat and desperate defences against sometimes overwhelming enemy forces. All of which sounds promising, but Firefall also features a lack of variety, constant busywork and a set of interconnected systems that sit awkwardly against the moment-to-moment drudgery of the game. It has potential. The problem is that, in almost every instance, it fails to meet the ideal it's trying to sell.

The single greatest example of this at least across the thirty hours that I've played is found in Sunken Harbor. It's a hub containing a PvP arena, designed as a space for players to let off steam between missions and activities. Only, where the in-game displays and banners advertise a fully featured team competition, the reality is an unstructured free-for-all, where the few who show up take pot-shots at each other before growing bored and wandering off. Mostly it sits empty; a symbolic beacon of Firefall's lengthy and troubled development.

That's a shame, because, in the right place, with the right class and when participating in the right event, you get a hint of what the game should have been. There's a frantic fun to be had dodging and weaving with your jetpack, avoiding fire and clearing out hordes. Firefall contains the suggestion of a solid shooter, and occasionally it comes to the surface.

Set primarily in Brazil, Firefall depicts a world that's witnessed more than its share of cataclysm. First there was the Firefall itself: an asteroid shower that devastated much of the planet. More relevant to the main plot is the Arclight, an interstellar spaceship that crashed into Earth on its maiden voyage. Its flaring crystite engines pulled through a strange purple death cloud from an alternate dimension. This is the Melding, from which emerged the Chosen the rather self-defeating name given to the humanoid beings now trying to wipe out humanity.



This is the backdrop against which you, the gun-for-hire Ares 35, operate. As a mercenary, the invasion of the Chosen is, at first, only tangentially related to your operations. The war provides plenty of opportunities to pick up work, and so the majority of your time will be spent taking on missions from each hub's job board. These offer a variety of scenarios in which you must go to a place and kill some things. Sometimes you're killing things while defending a person, sometimes you're killing things while collecting some items, and sometimes you're killing things because those things needed killing.

Each job is accompanied by dialogue between your handler, Aero, and your temporary employer. Some form multi-part quest chains that span multiple hubs. At each new area, I made sure to pick up any missions involving a rogue named Wiley, who'd previously had dealings with my callsign's last owner. It was a fun little mystery sprinkled sparsely throughout my time with the game. But aside from this, and a few other notable exceptions, the game's conversations waver between incidental and annoying. Aero, in particular, has a jarringly moralistic edge. She'll repeatedly tell NPCs you're not a contract killer, which, given all the killing you do, rings somewhat false.

From its opening moments, through to its sparse end game (currently a dedicated PvP zone and couple of raid bosses), Firefall is an awkward mix of shooter and MMO. It doesn't have the breadth of systems needed to keep levelling entertaining. As such, the game devolves into repetition. Many objectives struggle to sustain the pretense of variety across even a single mission. Too many times, I would take down the requisite number of bandits, only for that counter to increase as a new wave spawned.



The few times a mission does try something different, it can go badly wrong. In one job, I was required to disguise as a bandit. This happened without warning after completing a combat objective, leaving me close to death and without my abilities, jetpack or health regeneration. Even after I'd inevitably died, I respawned at the quest hub with the disguise still intact forced to sprint back to the objective without access to my deployable vehicle. A potentially interesting mission became memorable only for its failings.

When you're not on a job, you'll be stopping at one of the dynamic events that appear across the map. These range from small, solo missions, to more difficult group activities. There's little to distinguish these from the regular quests you're still travelling to an area of the map to fend off bugs, bandits or Chosen. But many require you to hold out against waves of enemies, and it's this structure that provides the best showcase for Firefall's combat.

At the start, each player has access to five basic battleframes. These lightweight mech suits act as your class, and can be swapped at any Battleframe Station without changing character. Earned XP goes towards levelling your currently equipped frame, so while experimentation is possible, it's more effective to stick with a single type. The battleframe you equip defines your weapons and abilities, and while all are useful in combat some have the edge in terms of how enjoyable they are to play.

In particular, the minigun of the Dreadnaught and the scoped automatic rifle of the Recon are unexciting to wield. In typical MMO style, enemies can have a big chunk of health. Holding the mouse button over one as their HP slowly drains is an uninteresting interaction. I grew more attached to the plasma grenades of Assault class's cannon, which required me to be consistently accurate while on the move. It doesn't match the satisfying skill level required by Tribes: Ascend's Thumper DX or Spinfusor, but at least offered a challenge that dragged me through the game's repetition.



Each frame can equip abilities to the first four slots of the hotbar, and it's these that gel so well with the defensive mission architype. Engineers can place turrets, Biotech's can deploy healing area-of-effect spells, and Assaults can slam to the ground, doing huge damage to the collected enemies below. The best example of this is squad "Thumps". These are resource collection events, and can be called down by players to any location. Personal thumpers offer a challenge, but it's the craftable squad versions that provide some of the game's most tense and engrossing battles.

If this is starting to sound like unqualified praise, know that the event system is completely unsupported by the way players travel across the map. Melding Tornadoes are one of the other most interesting activities the game offers a group battle against a swirling, purple, Chosen-spawning twister. It's a call to arms for the playerbase, with the coordinates shared over zone chat whenever one appears. Except, even knowing where it is, it can difficult to reach. You can teleport to mission hubs, but doing so costs Credits a valuable currency that I was never comfortable wasting. At which point, you're forced to either walk or drive, the latter only an option if you've bought a vehicle with real money or crafted one following a level 25 mission. Most of the tornadoes had disappeared by the time I'd arrived. That or they were empty, leaving me with no hope of finishing the encounter.

This is Firefall's other major failing: it doesn't respect your time. Yes, it's a nice looking game the alien vibrancy and variety making up for some inconsistent texture quality and off-puttingly cartoonish NPCs but these scenic views don't justify the how long you'll spend sprinting from location to location. In one early mission, I was asked to trek north to meet with a character. When I arrived, they asked me to turn around and head back. It's an almost comically egregious example, but it highlights a persistent flaw.



The real money store is largely stocked with cosmetics and XP boosts. It's not "pay to win" a meaningless designation in a predominantly PvE game but it is skewed so that the non-paying options take more time than they're worth. Crystite, the basic in-game currency, is earned slowly, and is largely swallowed up by researching new crafting options. This in itself is a slow process all crafting actions are performed on a timer that can take anything from seconds to days. That timer, of course, can be bypassed by paying real money.

These are all small inconveniences, but they add up. Yes, free-to-play games must strike a balance between time and money, but here that balance feels off. Not because of the contents of the store, or the value of each currency, but because Firefall is rarely engaging enough to make the commitment worthwhile.

Details
Price: Free-to-play
Release: Out now
Publisher: Red 5 Studios
Developer: In-house
Website: www.firefallthegame.com
Multiplayer: Massively

Firefall, the free-to-play MMO shooter, is now available. As per PC Gamer's reviews policy, MMOs aren't scored until our reviewer has spent time with the public release. This, then, is part two of a review-in-progress, charting Phil's initial impressions with the game. You'll find part one here.

Things get off to an interesting start. I log in and head towards a new area, and the new campaign mission I've unlocked. As I make my way toward the mission flag, I'm alerted to some "seismic activity". The warning is coming from a resource node. Sensing it would be a bad idea, I blow it up anyway. Yes, it was a bad idea. An insectoid creature emerges from the ground, much higher than my current level. It's takes a few swipes from my health, but, with plenty of jetpack strafing, I manage to bring it down.

That's seemingly how Firefall's combat functions, at least at these relatively early levels. My class doesn't appear to be that tough, but the jetpack enables them to evade the attacks of melee enemies. That upward thrust doesn't last forever, though, so fights become a sort of mid-air see-saw of jukes and dodges. I stand by my criticisms of the combat's feel, but I do like this particular aspect of each fight.

That done, I continue towards the mission. This time, I'm distracted by a Wounded Bandit. He asks me to grab a nearby medkit, clearly setting me up for a trap. I do it anyway, and, fully expecting him to spring a trap, I dutifully heal him. He springs a trap. It comes in the form of a second, grenade firing bandit, calling for more strafing and, eventually, more killing. At the end of my last post, I asked for more variety. So far, Firefall has responded admirably.

I've also been reassessing the graphics mostly by rubbing my face against some walls. I'm coming to the conclusion that they're inconsistent. At times the game looks really good, especially when you're looking out at a vista...



...But there are definite lows when it comes to texture quality in particular, large surfaces of rock and terrain. Part of the problem is the way textures are streamed in. I've noticed textures visibly 'pop' into their higher quality version, as the the game catches up with what I'm looking at. All that said, the aesthetic remains strong as I work through New Eden, and that's definitely a point in the game's favour.

Okay, finally it's time for that mission. 'Oilspill', a pretty shady character from the campaign's first quest, asks me to grab an auxiliary engine from a scapyard. First, I must pick meat off the corpse of a nearby animal, so as to distract the yard's patrolling dogs. Only, I don't really need to distract the dogs the junk stacks are so high that they can't reach me as I jet between them. I find the item, kill the robot that tries to steal it, and make my way outta there. After all the build up, it's a bit of an anti-climax.

Maybe I'll get more out of the ARES mission now showing on my map. These are a type of dynamic world event designed to be a bit more involved than crashed LGVs or Thumpers. Here, I'm asked to recover some tchotchke from a cave filled with Chosen. It's a fetch quest, then, but one versus an encamped army equipped with specialised weapons. It's an enjoyable fight, and satisfying to complete. These higher level Chosen provide a more interesting (and life threatening) challenge. More importantly, they're humanoid. Much of the game has, up until now, been based around fighting small, annoying bugs. Hopefully, from this point on, I'll be fighting more not-small, not-annoying not-bugs.

As I return to the nearest mission hub, I stumble across another Wounded Bandit. So maybe not that varied after all.


Currency and Crafting
Let's talk about the free-to-play stuff. There are three main currencies in Firefall: Crystite, Credits and Red Bean. Crystite is earned out in the game's world. It drops from enemies and is awarded for mission completion. It's used to purchase items from many of the worlds merchants, and can also be cashed in for Credits. These are the currency of the trading market. Here, you can buy almost anything from other players from items and equipment, to advanced battleframes.

Finally, there's Red Bean, which is acquired either with real money or through the trading of Credits. The Red Bean store favours customisation and time-limited VIP boosts, most of which are also available on the trading market. My worry is that certain systems for instance, crafting seem designed to favour those willing to spend. It's never a hard necessity, but Red Bean makes life in Firefall easier. And while it can be acquired without spending real money, the necessary exchange of Crystite to Credits to Red Bean is a potentially grind-heavy process. You'll need a decent chunk of Crystite to get a single Red Bean. The question will be how easy is it to collect at the game's higher levels, and how much will the market prices fluctuate?

Crafting, then. There are three possible actions: researching, refining and manufacturing. Researching uses the science points earned by salvaging items to unlock the blueprints for better equipment. Refining turns raw resources into craftable materials, and occasionally spits out a rarer bonus. Finally, there's manufacturing: spending your materials to create the desired item. So far, so standard. There's no complexity to these interactions you just pick and click but each process takes time. You have two activity spots initially, with two more available to buy at an extremely cheap Crystite price. Choose an activity, and it will fill one of those spaces for a set time anything from seconds to hours. Of course, you can skip the wait by spending Red Bean.



For some, that will be fine, but it really depends on how you approach MMO crafting. Traditionally, I craft in spurts dedicating a single day to building my skill, then forgetting about it for weeks after. Here, there's no mastery just a constant need to engage with a system that I don't find engaging. The result is that I'm instead planning to get gear via loot drops and trading.

My last few hours with Firefall have been somewhat better than the first. Really, though, the thing that I keep coming back to is how arbitrary this week's launch feels. From what I've seen so far, Firefall certainly doesn't feel finished more like a placeholder for what's to come. There's potential, sure, but I don't think this release version comes close to achieving it.

Firefall, the free-to-play MMO shooter, is now available. As per PC Gamer's reviews policy, MMOs aren't scored until our reviewer has spent time with the public release. Here, then, is a review-in-progress, charting Phil's initial impressions with the game.

Things get off to a bad start when, upon loading into the game, I recoil in horror at what my eyeballs are seeing. I'll cover Firefall's graphics later, but the tutorial map is perhaps the worst possible introduction to its aesthetic. The textures are blurry, the environments murky, and the characters flat and cartoonish. Compared to this year's other MMO releases, there's none of the vibrancy or charm of Wildstar, and none of the relatively higher-res textures of the otherwise visually bland (and oppressively foggy) TESO.

I head into the video settings. Everything is already set to "Ultra High". Oh dear.

During an introductory meander, I'm shown the game's range of battleframes. These are the jetpack-sporting mech suits that function as the player's class. There's a standard selection of types: medic, tank, DPS, sniper and engineer, and, at the basic level, each does what you'd expect. Initially, I pick the Assault, a mid-range DPS with a plasma cannon. To its credit, Firefall openly allows for class experimentation. It's not your character that levels up, but their individual battleframes. Trying out a new class is as easy as finding a Battleframe Station and switching the loadout starting back at level one for each new frame, but retaining any progression on those previously used.



With my class picked, I walk up some stairs to find a couple of dropships. Nothing happens. At the other end of the launch pad is what looks like a new area, but an invisible wall stops me from reaching it. Eventually, two more players arrive and appear to be equally confused. We shoot ineffectually at some scenery, but it doesn't help. The next section has failed to load. I quit out, and, on reloading, get kicked back to the start of the tutorial. This time, upon completion, I'm successfully queued into the mission instance.

Much of my time in Firefall so far has been about trying to recover from these initial disappointments. And from a more persistent issue: I'm not wild about the game's combat. It's a direct attack system that doesn't use auto-targeting, but it still feels awkwardly placed between MMO and shooter. The biggest problem is the feel of the weapons. They lack punch something I attribute to the way the enemies react when hit (or rather, don't). When killed, the bugs I've been fighting will gib in a satisfyingly squishy way. But, other than for that final blow, they have no response to being tagged by the mini-explosions of my plasma bursts. Sure, they lose a chunk of health, but in a shooter I want firefights to offer more than a mathematical impact.

The most egregious example of this comes much later in my initial session. I'm fighting a mission boss who has a couple of levels over my assault frame. As such, it's a long fight my attacks only taking off a fraction of his health bar. It should be a tense battle for survival, but really, I'm just strafing his slow rocket attacks while spamming plasma fire in his direction. With every hit, his health goes down, and a number indicates how much damage I do. Other than that, though, he's entirely unconcerned by the incoming damage.



None of which is to say there aren't things about Firefall I like. Rather, these issues sour its better moments. From what I've played so far, it seems like a problematic game that, in the right circumstances, can offer moments of frantic gunplay. At times, the sheer variety and number of enemies and the mobility offered by each battleframe's jetpack distract from the weaknesses of combat. It's at its best during hoard mode style defence missions, which, perhaps fortuitously, is what many of its activities involve.

After the tutorial, the first major zone is New Eden. It's here I become familiar with the structure of Firefall. It's also here I get to re-evaluate its look. Up close, Firefall is not a pretty game a problematic fact given that it's played primarily in first-person view. But there is a strong setting. The opening area of Copacabana is bright, vibrant, and filled with weird and colourful coral reefs. At night, it looks bland and uninspired, but during the day, it's actually quite fetching.

As I travel through New Eden, I'm introduced to the various activities the game has to offer. Campaign missions unlock at specific levels, and focus on the war against the Chosen the mysterious humanoids that mysteriously emerge from the mysterious "Melding", a purple death-cloud that (mysteriously) covers huge swathes of the planet. Back in the open world, you can accept missions from the job board, find dynamic events, or try your hand at "Thumping".



This latter option is tied to resource collection, and offers some of the game's most entertaining battles. At any point in the world, you can use a "Scan Hammer" to check nearby resources. Find a good vein, and you call down your Thumper, which crashes to the ground and starts pounding at the earth. You job along with that of any player in the vicinity is to defend the Thumper from waves of enemies until it finishes its collection, at which point anyone who takes part is rewarded with the resources it collects. It's an enjoyable mission type that does a good job at attracting nearby players.

The other activities are less consistently engaging. Job board missions are mostly tasks undertaken for the local populace usually involving clearing out an area or rescuing a person. They're fine, and occasionally inventive, but do require you to listen to the constant chatter of flat, disinterested voice actors. There's padding, too. At one point, I'm asked to make my way out north to meet up with the mission giver. Once I arrive, she asks me to go back to the town I was already in.

Finally, there are dynamic events, which aren't as grand as they sound. They're mini-missions that appear on your map, usually involving rescuing data of a crashed vehicle or Thumper. Again, it's primarily a defence mission, but here the small scale means less reward. They're fine as a stopgap on the way to the next mission proper, but rarely worth the effort of tracking down.

Press 'E' to Distraught Wife.

As I approach level ten in my main battleframe, I'm being reasonably engaged by the world and what it offers. Right now, I'm mostly mainlining job board missions interspersed with the odd Thump as and when the resources make it worthwhile. At the same time, I'm desperately hoping there's more variety down the line.

Head here for the second part of my Firefall review in progress.