Warframe is a game made by Digital Extremes, or DE for short. The game is a looter-shooter-adventure set in a sci-fi universe, where you try to increase your arsenal of weapons so that you can ultimately flex on anyone else in the game and say how much more you have than them. Jokes aside, the game is very time-consuming, but it is also a very casual game where you are in total control of how you have fun.

The game was originally published in 2013, but it had a very hard road to its release. It could not find any publishers who wanted to invest in the game, mainly because they thought that the game would fail. For that reason, it was hard for DE during that time to publish Warframe and not go bankrupt. 

So they decided to risk it all and hope that their game would pick up a following. 

And it did. 

During the launch, they had a special called “Founders Pack” that cost anywhere from $20 to $250. This deal offered some premium in-game currency and some rewards for buying it, but the main reason for the pack was to help keep DE afloat financially.

Warframe itself follows a pretty easy, on-surface narrative. You are a warframe that is in the solar system during the post-Orokin era. The Orokin were a species that were so technologically advanced that they could terraform whole planets in a matter of months. But the Orokin civilization ultimately crashed, due to corruption amongst their people and some catastrophic experimentations.

In the game, you fight against the three main factions: the Grineer, the Corpus, and the Infested. The Grineer is an army of clones that are slowly deteriorating in quality with each generation, and their life-span is dwindling. They are equipped with armor and high-impact weapons. 

The Corpus are a tech-savvy, business and profit-seeking faction. They fight with gadgets and use shields as a way to protect themselves. 

And the Infested are the result of an Orokin experiment gone wrong. This is an infestation that consumes anything living or non-living and subdues it to a hivemind. Where the Infested lack in defense, they succeed by killing others with their huge numbers.

You as a player are part of a faction called the Tenno, who control warframes, which are basically suits of armor that allow the player to have different types of playstyles. They were once part of an elite Orokin military, but due to corruption within the system, your faction was the ultimate reason why the Orokin ceased to exist. Now, many years later, the Grineer and Corpus are in a war over who should rule the system, and you are in the middle of it.

During your time in the game, you go from mission to mission to collect resources in order to create a multitude of weapons and warframes. Some warframes are great at synergizing with weapons by allowing them to shoot faster, or they may mirror out the weapon so that the same weapon shoots multiple times. Other warframes offer their own unique weapons that are empowered, ranging from swords that shoot out razors, to bows that can penetrate an infinite number of enemies.

Other than just weapons and warframes, you are also equipped with a satisfying parkour system, which allows you to traverse hundreds of meters of distance in one fell swoop. This system feels very polished and allows the player to latch onto the walls, to double jump, and to ground-slam for extra distance.

Each mission in the game follows a simple objective, ranging from eliminating a target, sabotaging an object, or completing an endurance test, where you try to survive for as long as possible. Following newer updates, players have been presented with open-world systems that offer more mission types. Other than just missions, these updates have introduced new resources that you can use to build new weapons, and they offer new mechanics, like fishing and mining.

Another recently-added game mode has been called railjack. This allows the player to control a spaceship with a crew, and they board enemy ships to gather even more resources to build more weapons.

Even after nine years of development, Warframe is still getting new updates that bring more and more new experiences to the game. The community is very welcoming and wants everyone to enjoy playing. 

The game is overall very polished, and with only a few exceptions, it feels very satisfying to play. I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who just wants a casual power fantasy.