Firefall - Early impressions (1st week)

Let me start off by saying this: If you have ever played Unreal Tournament or Quake and you thoroughly enjoyed the experience, you may want to give Firefall a shot - the gameplay is remarkably similar.

Website/Account Creation: Simple, easy, no hiccups.  Exactly what I like to see.  The download went smoothly.  No hassle or fuss.

Character Creation: Nothing special.  Rather generic.  You can change your appearance in-game. Also, don't be afraid what class (battleframe) you start out with.  You can change it on the fly in-town.

Graphics: Cell-shaded but nice looking.  Not extremely high end but you can definitely tell you are playing a new game.  Scales well with high end machines.

Art Style: Cartoony *gasp!*, Borderland-like art with just a touch of Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Mech Warrior themes.  I enjoy it.

Environment: Big, dense jungles, tundras, and beaches.  Sometimes its a nightmare navigating, but you quickly realize that everything IS accessible.  Yes, you can traverse everything.

Dungeons: Not really your typical dungeons per se, but there are areas you dive in to, to take out the baddies.  These are very simple in design, not very large, and easy to navigate.

PvE: It varies in difficulty, on a scale from 1 to 5 (I believe).  This game is no walk in the park.  You WILL die if you try to run into a group of mobs and try to take them on alone (unless you know what you are doing and use your abilities wisely).  I really like the fact that I do need to find cover and I do need to slowly take out the force before I can progress farther in a mission.  It really seems to be about quantity here.  You may be able to kill a mob in 5 seconds, but you'll be fighting 8 at a time (or more).  It can get pretty crazy, especially during the chosen events.  But its still very fun.

Controls and character Movement: Silky smooth.  Nothing is 'clunky', everything just glides the way you expect it to.  I think the controls are one of the shining points of this game. Vehicle control is slightly more limited but its still easy to understand and use.

UI: Easy to navigate and get use to.  There are times where it bugs out and a certain window or screen won't load, but this happens maybe once every few hours.  The inventory seems like its HTML based because it will take awhile to load (3-5 seconds), which can be quite frustrating when you quickly want to grab something and keep on moving.  I'd imagine both of these things will be fixed.

Combat: Just like the character movement, combat is silky smooth.  There is no annoying clunky feeling.  Each class(battleframe) has unique mechanics and abilities which make trying out something new a fun and rewarding experience.  This is a fast paced FPS in the style of quake and unreal tournament.  Seriously   Remember the shock rifle, translocator, shield gun, link gun, lightning gun, and mini-gun?  Yeah, they are all in here and play almost exactly the same.  You also have shields, turrents, speed boost, a ton of other things found in those games. 

With jetpacks, you will see a lot of 'bunny hopping' tactics.  If you detest bunny hopping - you may not like this game.  I'm perfectly fine with it.

Grouping: You can solo fairly easy in this game.  However, grouping with people, or atleast having people around (which there will be many of) while you take out baddies and complete missions will be beneficial to everybody.  You want to gain experience and resources as quickly as possible and being in a group will just make this happen faster.

Crafting: I'll be honest, crafting is poorly explained.  It took awhile to realize wtf I was doing.  Regardless, crafting is not difficult.  You get 'raw' resources.  You can refine 'raw' resources. You can use refined resources to start making components or in-game currency (called crystite I believe).  From there, you can build equipment to make your character stronger (such as better weapons, plating, and even improve your abilities).  The method for crafting is going to a crafting station, pick what you want to research, build, or refine, and then do something else while the crafting finishes.  Yes, its like Eve's skill system where you pick what you want to do and then a timer starts.  Obviously the lower end stuff is finished quickly while the higher end stuff can take several hours or longer.

PvP: PvP is fun, fast paced, run and gun type action.  It does feel like the health to damage ratio is kind of off since everybody does a ton of damage but have relatively low health pools.  Some classes are just straight up stronger then others (surprise!).  My Mammoth, who is one of the tank classes in game, is just too slow and does too little damage to be effect in pvp.  However, in PvE, he's a beast.  The game is ultimately team based so each class DOES compliment each other.  But truth be told, speed and damage are still the best attributes to have, atleast for pvp. 

I don't foresee their Jetball gameplay mode really catching on in the E-sport community.  Huttball sucked ass in SWTOR, and now Jetball kind of sucks ass in Firefall.  Let's just leave balls out of our MMORPGs.

Conclusion: As a fan of both mmorpgs and shooters, i'm thoroughly enjoying myself.  I have decided to buy a starter pack so I can support the company.  However, you really do not need to spend money if you want to remain competitive.  The game does feel a little redundant as you jump from one location to another, killing baddies, completing the missions, then rinse and repeat.  While you can technically say the game is a non-linear sandbox, it simply doesn't have a ton of things to do.  But then again, i've only played for less then a week so I probably have a lot more to discover.