The Brief:

We are bombarded by an asteroid. Earth amidst the chaos, finds Crystite from the asteroid.  Searches for the source of the Crystite, travels to it for more Crystite, discover Arcfolding and trying to prevent history from repeating itself.

Game Story:

The game story-line is revolved around a certain meteor shower on earth that happened in 2178 according to the records. Hence the name Firefall.

The meteor shower was due to a giant asteroid that dispersed into smaller and larger fragments, which was caused by the slow speed and angle of descent of the asteroid and the Earths gravitational pull.  The dispersion of the asteroid was caused by the satellites, orbital tethers and anything that was in it’s path as it came in.  This whole incident had created new islands and mountain ranges, left certain regions underwater and obliterated whole countries.

Due to the Firefall incident countries ended up going to war. The US broke off into it’s old states, and the EU is still trying to stay together. While Japan was trying to rebuild they came across something later called Crystite on one of their meteorite survey.  Crystite was not of this earth obviously but it broke every law of physics that we knew of.

Crystite became Earth’s best power source as it dwarfed every other power sources.  The problem was that it was a finite supply.  That’s when they began looking for the trajectory of the asteroid that hit them and see where it originated from.  Colony ships were build to send them to where Crystite originated from and harvest more of it.

Since they didn’t want history to repeat itself in regards to what United States did back when it was still a British colony, they started to build a giant military ship called the Archlight; bigger than all three CMS colony ships combined.  The military personnel on Archlight was fully manned by veterans as stated in a record there were no “green-soldiers”.

Archlight was running on something called Arcfolding, which was sort of like teleporting.  Only problem was that it required high amounts of energy and it wasn’t precise.  There was another issue as well; when you are arcfolded through space you are exposed to an “absolute void between points”, which meant that what arrived on the other side had a surface temperature of absolute zero. Dangerous for any water based organisms, but Dr. Mitra Bathsheba was able to create a energy shield that could keep organic matter safe from the void.

Scale:

• Great
• Good
• Decent
• Not bad
• Bad
• Nope

Game:

• Graphic: Good
• Sound: Decent
• Animation: Good
• Story: Great
• Quests: Not bad
• Events: Decent
• Classes: Good
• Crafting: Good

Details:

• Graphics are good for a F2P game.  In this day and age one shouldn’t expect less.  I would say the game graphics are smooth, look at the character design and you will get my “pun”.
• Sound could be worked on not in terms of music or just normal sounds, but there are times where I lose all sound to a certain weapon, vehicle or just lose background sound. It doesn’t take long to get back to normal, but it shouldn’t happen.
• Animations are well done and I like that in games – when things look smooth in regards to how something reacts.
• Story as can be seen, I ranked as “Great” – because it is a great story, even though it might be somewhat cliche to some degree.
• Quests could have been done way better – the fact that you have to travel 500m to get to “your” spot. Yes you are assigned a place where you can do your quest, there isn’t a specific spot for that quest.  For example, if I took a quest from the ARES Board, it tells me to go a set distance to get somewhere to do something.  I get there and get started on that quest and if I get disconnected, I get teleported back to where you would normally spawn if you died and the quest gets reset and the location is now either farther away, closer or in a totally different area. The reason why it isn’t lower on the scale is because people can actually finish your quest if it’s a kill quest even if they aren’t in your squad/party.  They still get exp and maybe some loot but that’s it.
• Events are nice and spawn randomly on the map, sort of like quests except you don’t get them from an ARES board.  I have encountered that if an event with “Chosen” (the main antagonists in this game) is ongoing, and you have a mission right next to them where you have to kill – say some gang members, they start shooting at each other and you can get both your Event and Quest finished that way.  It’s uncommon for it to happen but it does occur.
• Classes would probably be a bad word to use since you are thrown into the world with a character that you haven’t chosen anything on, but you can be anything and everything.  The game works on what they call Battleframes.  It’s like a suit of armor you just switch out and play. Keep in mind though that when you switch to say, Firecat (one of the frames) and you’ve never played that before because you were Recon for the past 30ish so levels, you will be a level 1 Firecat.  This is kinda like how Killing Floor is.  There are five standard Battleframes that you can choose from, Assault, Engineer, Dreadnought, Biotech, Recon.  All of those classes have advanced classes.  I mentioned Firecat earlier; that Frame is an advancement of Assault.
• Crafting is tied together tightly with researching, because you can’t craft stuff unless you research them.  You can research everything if you have enough Crystite and Research points. To get those, the game has something called Salvage which lets you salvage all the drops items or quest rewards around the world and give you research points, Crystite and some other crafting materials. You can also mine with Sonic Detonators or Thumpers, or if you are lucky enough or good enough you can get into a Nado which is the short word for Melding Tornado where after you “defeat it” you can enter it and get all the goodies (Ore: Iron, Titanium and Uranium) you want before the melding closes in on you and swallows you (yeah literally swallows you and kills you).

Conclusion:

Definitely worth the try, I mean it’s a Free to Play game what have you got to lose? Oh a few hours of your life, I am sure if you were worried about that you wouldn’t be checking this game out. 😉

It lacks in terms of proper questing, but it’s just a new way of doing things. Who knows?  You might like it; I mean I’ve played it for so long and to be honest I don’t feel like it was time wasted mostly due to how the random events in the world are.