I BET YOU WANT A FIREFALL BETA KEY!

I was recently sent an invitation to the closed beta for Firefall which is an open world MMO, RPG, 3^rd/1^st person shooter. It feels and looks a lot like borderlands with the exception that it is in MMO form. The weapons are not as playful nor are the abilities and every ability thus far seems more like last minute support than an effective plan of attack of course I have not gotten very far into my leveling tree. Speaking of which, leveling is very interesting in that all classes are available to you at all times when you play one you rack up XP for that class and can buy another upgrade when you have enough. The upgrades, a lot like the abilities, do not seem very useful thus far but I am still at the bottom of the tree so I am sure they will get better. I really like that every character and every class are given some type of jump jet with the exception of rpg abilities, it is a cool way to throw a twist into what would be yet another bland shooter, however, even though I say that I am starting to get a good sense of how the different classes mesh together in both PVE and PVP. I was digging for resources which attracted the attention of many enemy AIs and as an assault class I had a good DPS with close ranged combat and an effective AOE weapon, my mobility was high but my health and defense was not so I could not hold off many enemies on my own for too long without dying. As I was fighting two engineers landed on the mountain behind me and started laying down turret drones which aggroed many of the enemies allowing me to fly up to that mountain and defend the engineers by firing into the crowd of enemies with my AOE gun. This experience really gave me a nice feel for how the game is supposed to work out and all in all I had a lot of fun with it. 

It has been quite some time since I came back to Firefall so I decided to take another little romp about this tiny and desperately lacking world that Red Five studios would dare to call an MMO. Since there was seemingly nothing left for my character to do other than kill the same couple of bug like enemies that I had already killed one hundred times over I decided to check out the PVP aspect of Firefall as it seemed like a large part of the game and the developers had poured quite a bit of love into it. Obviously, you play with your own character and can switch their class or "battleframe" at any point during the match like many other multiplayer shooters. I decided to start with my acrobatic, mid-ranged health, assault class armed with a low damage smg and a shotgun like weapon that fires off a ball of energy that then causes a wide area of splash damage. The smg was almost completely useless and the shotgun was almost impossible to aim especially as everyone was flying around with their thrusters because the shotgun does not fire straight, it lobs up and dips down. The only real advantage of the assault class was the high damage of the shotgun, when it hit, and its high mobility. I decided to change into a class that more suited my style, the dreadnaught. The dreadnaught is the tank class. Slow moving, medium dps, high health and defense. You see I like to play shooters as though I were rambo, I run straight into the fray of bullets and fire to my heart's content and you need a class with some serious defense to be successful with that strategy. While I had quite a deal more fun using the dreadnaught, the main minigun that he carries took way too long to charge up and his special skills that deploy a very small shield to trap enemies and protect you from ranged attacks or take an immobile stance that improves accuracy and fire rate but limits visibility were not very useful at all with everyone moving around so fast. Still for all of my criticism I can definitely see that they have something of an interesting shooter coming together. Player movement and aiming is very fluid but it has no heft to it. When you fire a shotgun in Gears of War you can almost feel the kick of the gun and the ripping of flesh as the shells tear through it, but in Firefall, I see the bullets flying but I don't feel like I am firing them. I am not expecting this to be as good of a shooter as Gears but I think the definitely need to change some character animatics.