While Firefall may not be Game of the Year, I simply can't stop playing.

Firefall is a surprising, enigmatic game. It doesn't feel like a blockbuster game, but it's incredibly addictive in all the right ways. The logical part of my brain wonders "Is this game actually good?", while the rest is just having fun and shouting "AWESOME!"

People have called Firefall the "Borderlands MMO." That's a good place to start: an FPS MMO with satisfying RPG elements. The games themselves share few similarities, and Red 5 Studios went further with Firefall than you might expect.

Considering it's free-to-play, it's definitely worth the download to try it out – and if you're like me, it'll stick around for months to come. To find out why, let's look a little closer.

The Best

Movement: Firefall absolutely nails movement, especially with the FOV cranked up. Walking is fast, sprinting is faster, and the jumpjets are awesomely fun. Because there’s so much vertical movement, Firefall has a good “verticality” to it. When traveling horizontally, Red 5 amps that up too with Gliders. Walk over a Glider Pad and blast into the air! After floating 80% of the way to your objective, the last 20% is a breeze.

Battleframes: There are five main class types, with sixteen total battleframes. With unique playstyles, abilities, and primary weapons, it’s a ton of fun just exploring what they can do. Each battleframe levels individually, meaning one character swaps between classes.

Items: Everything item-related is well-executed.  Weapons have decent variety, and finding better weapons is satisfying. Weapon Mods can improve your weapon, and modify just about any stat. Want a faster rate-of-fire, or a longer clipsize? Weapon Mods can make it happen.

Abilities: Even your battleframe’s Abilities are treated as items. The feeling of discovering an improved version of your Abilities is better than a new weapon. Just like weapons, there are Ability Mods which can increase potency and reduce cooldown.

Salvaging: Scrap everything you don’t want, and turn it into things you need. You get excited for every single dropped item, because everything has real value. Instead of selling to a vendor (snooze), you turn items into Crystite, crafting ingredients, and – most importantly – Research Points!

Crafting: With your Research Points (and some Crystite), you unlock branching trees of crafting recipes. There’s a very surprising number of things to craft, so it’s hard to properly evaluate. From a glance, it seems like a good system.

Gathering Resources: To find resources, you smash your Scan Hammer onto the ground. If you like the Scan Report, you can call down a massive Thumper from the skies to extract. Suddenly, you have to defend the Thumper from incoming hordes of enemies annoyed at the ‘disturbance’. This is an awesome system, and makes resource-gathering a satisfying challenge.

Multiplayer: My first time Thumping, I had a few nearby players jump into the action to earn some rewards. I had spontaneously generated a tiny world event, and people were having fun helping out. Very cool. I’d imagine playing with friends would be even better!

User Interface: The UI has a nice aesthetic and allows for in-depth customization. I didn’t tweak it myself, because the default was good – but the option is there. Even though I often felt lost navigating menus, I always seemed to end up where I wanted to be.

Shooting: Actually using weapons had a good feel to it. Tearing through enemies and blasting through Aranhas didn’t get dull. Weapon types had solid variety, and none of them felt underpowered.

Audio: A definite strength for Firefall. Weapons and abilities sound rich, and the music sets the mood very nicely. Even the jumpjets for different battleframes had their own tone.
 

>> Page 2: The Bad, Mixed Bag and Verdict
 

Colt "ShdwFlm" Casey
Deputy Editor