I have over 2000 hours in it, in that time I’ve spent $100 on ingame currency. I an honestly say it’s one of the best games I’ve every played, or technically 6 of the best games I’ve every played because Digital Extremes has this habit of making a whole new game and just building it into Warframe. They’ve got skateboards, spaceflight, mech fights, small game hunting, fishing, horse races, and street fighter. You can decorate your house and your giant clan hall, you can customize your gear for peek fashion, you can customize the little spaceship you fly in loading screens.

Easily the best thing in the game is that the paid for currency is tradeable. You can trade valuable in-game assets to oust players in an open market for it, effectively meaning that if you can’t or don’t want to spend money, you can still get the cool cosmetics through grind. Moreso, while you can buy most things with money, the only things you need the money for is cosmetics, everything else is pretty easy to earn in-game and it isn’t until you get to the late-game content that it becomes a little grindy.

Lastly, it’s co-op. You don’t play against other players, so you never run into those feel bad moments where some whale or an ancient like me cleans house, instead we’re more likely to pick up new players and Sherpa you through later content to get frames or gear. The community is just super nice.

its a good game but verry grindy and to fast paced for me,

its a looter shooter with incredibly fast movement options.
there is a sea of content but the game has terrible onboarding so you dont quite know where to get started.

if you try it out your first goal should be to unlock the solar system.

make a stop on venus to unlock rhino,
hes imo a good frame for beginners and you’ll learn how to farm (non prime) frames.

if you start to struggle with damage or defense,
look into the mod system, its very important and the game barely explains it.

there is a premium currency called platinum.
but you can trade it between players,
so it became the trading currency.
you can think of it like the path of exile economy,
except the currency cant drop and is sold by the developer instead of third party websites.

The game is incredibly grindy, as other have said, but honestly I’d argue that’s kind of the point of the game. It’s kind of made for the grind, you’re always farming for some new thing or trying to get the perfect build for your Warframe, it’s just how it is.

What is kind of cool on the micro transaction side is that people can trade the premium currency. So there are a lot of things you can’t just buy from the in game store with platinum, but people can farm for it and trade it. So you can farm for desirable blueprints and parts and such and then sell them to other players for premium currency. It’s a very cool system, I think.

With Warframe, the grind is very there but it’s not the point. The point of Warframe is to learn how to slide and float around the level like an anime protagonist with everything falling to ribbons or exploding into gory mist around you, and to look good doing it. The unlocks and currency and quests all serve to open up different places and ways to do that. I saw someone saying the story is great; I dunno, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but that just means you can ignore it if you want. I put in over 800 hours because that bulletjump traversal feels so damn good (and I hate grind, WoW made that happen years ago). My wife has over 1000 hours; we didn’t have a clan, we only played together.

That’s a lot of hours, for free.

Grind and premium currency aside, the story is fantastic and there is a new major story/content update coming out in a few months.

For a 14 year old game, the devs and community are still very much active

I probably didnt play it right because for some reason, people LOVE Warframe.

I tried it for an hour and found it really boring.

Spent most the hour learning how to run in the game. Then it threw me in a mission with two other actual players, and I couldn’t remember how to do half the actions. So as I was quitting, the other players were yelling at me not to.

I was recommended it after being bored with Destiny 2, and felt I came in with the wrong misconceptions.

I havent played for years, I left right before plains of duviri. I heard there’s now steel soul which is hard mode, and theres parkour 4.0 now? Is there still the massive powercreep problem?

In my old experience, its fun at the lower levels where you don’t know the optimal loadouts yet and playing solo so nobody can optimize the fun out of the game, though the game becomes more toxic as time goes on, you need incredibly specific time locked gear to do endgame stuff.

Grinding is hell, I heard it got even worse, time locked and super rare enemies with <1% drop rates for meta mods or a resource you need thousands of.

Microtransactions are mostly fine, you don’t need to spend any money, just be prepared to grind even more to trade for the super rare stuff in the marketplace.

I play it about once a year to check for new story content. It’s fun. Grind is annoying, but if you don’t want a crazy build, you can mostly ignore it.

If you have 30 min, this video gives a fair overview of space ninjas for a new player

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-4zyMwPuAQ

Very grindy. The story quests can be slow and annoying, yet they unlock gameplay content. Some of them will lock you in special states that require you to complete them before returning to normal gameplay.

There is a ton of content, but requirements are abound for each of them. Everything requires a grind.

Super grindy

It is a grindy game, eventually you will need to make use of platinum ( premium currency) to unlock slots for warframes, weapons, pets or to unlock skins and convenience items like forma - which can be farmed but fully completed ones are a rare drop and to build 1 takes 23 hours- ( item used to allow great customisation of frames and weapons and resets forma’d object back to level 1) and there are a few other things spending platinum on mostly for slots, but that is in spoiler terriority to mention.

One can farm stuff most of the stuff if you have the time and patience, besides the “prime” version of mods and weapons and warframes.

Prime stuff is essentially the “best” version of something and considered “best in slot” for the space it takes( prime mods are a bit more complicated in regards “best”)

The prime mods one gets from a trader that pops up every 2 weeks and exchanges currency that is earned by cashing in prime parts for currency and use the currency to buy from the trader.

Prime warframes and weapons are rotated over time and put in a “vault” when its time has run its course. There are a few primes that not vaulted, but for the most part one just has to wait if they are looking for a specific prime.

Platinum can be traded for items, but is probably best to trade platinum on the unofficial market site.

Generally it is a good game with good gameplay, but is very, for lack of better word “gated” by a lot of timers and daily caps that either the impatient can use premium currency push through either by buying the stuff they want or speeding up the forging process

Grindy, but decent.

The game is extremely grindy and you can buy platinum with real money which allows you to buy a lot of things in game, not just cosmetics.

With that said though it’s generally a good game if you like grinding games in general. You don’t have buy platinum to get by and even if you do you can’t really skip the grind as far as I know (you can skip crafting times though which can be a week long for certain things last I checked.) You can also trade with other players for platinum, although I’ve never dabbled so I don’t know much about that honestly.

It’s not fun without buying platinum regularly when you get discounts