Warframe is a hard game to put into words for anyone who hasn't played it. For as many good things there are about it, there are bad things that make the game somewhat tedious. Despite this, I have a hard time not recommending the game. Almost nothing in out of the reach of Free-to-play players, which is something that a lot of other games can't say for themselves.

Lets start with the good:

Premium Currency & Trading: This might feel "weird" to be put in the good category, but it has a lot to do with the above comment. The premium currency is a tradable currency in-game; this means that you, as a player, can grind items and then sell them for the premium currency to other players. On top of this, Warframe is incredibly lenient with how much it gives out discounts for its premium currency. I'm not at all ashamed to admit that I've gotten a fair share of 50% off coupons in-game and immediately used it to get $100 of the currency for $50. This combined with the fact that a lot of players are willing to trade tit-for-tat means that trading in this game is fairly robust. Heck, I've even had some interactions where people would throw something in extra for free.

Grinding: Grinding in this game feels extremely rewarding, and once you learn how, when, and where to do it becomes exceedingly fun to do. Most grinds to craft things will only take you a few hours at most, and the fact that you get to choose items from any relic during relic missions means that most of the time you come out of missions feeling like you accomplished something.

Community: This is a bit of a weirder one. Although the community is incredibly nice and willing to help, the main incentives to do so are related to grinding. As such, a lot of times it feels a lot more fun to just go into missions with a group of friends rather than do things publicly because its easier to plan out.

Variety: The game has a STUPID amount of variety in the amount of playstyles that you can choose, further augmented by things called "Mods" that can increase various attributes. This game is incredibly flexible and freeform in terms of how you can choose to play, and its a part that I greatly enjoy.

Alright, so that was most of the good things, so now I'll hit you with the bad:

Time Gating: Although grinding is fairly quick in most cases, crafting in this game takes a set amount of time, ranging from 1 minute all the way to a few days for Warframes. This causes you to be incredibly bored early in the game, because you want to try other things but just can't because you need to wait on things to complete before getting to the meat and bones of the variety I talked about above. You can rush the crafting with the premium currency if you so choose, however.

Mastery Gating: With the above comes Mastery gating. Basically, Mastery is your characters level, so to speak. To increase Mastery, you need to level your equipment, whether its warframes, weapons, or even pets. This combined with time gating means that the pace of the game starts off INCREDIBLY slow, because not only does getting Mastery up take awhile, you can also only "level up" your mastery once per day. Mastery dictates what missions you can do, what weapons you can use, and what Warframes you have access to, so its a fairly high minus for me. On top of this, if you have any weapons or warframes that you really enjoy, it gets to a point where you're never able to play them because you need to level other things to progress your mastery.

Lack of Direction: Warframe is confusing. Incredibly confusing. The tutorial teaches you very little about the game and then just throws you off a cliff and tells you to have fun exploring the game. There's no goals for you to immediatly work towards, nor does it explain how you get new Warframes, how open world areas like Cetus, Fortuna, and Deimos work, nor does it really try to explain how to get some of the best mods in the game. This is all left to the player to figure out on their own, and often times means you're spending an exceedingly large amount of time on the Warframe Wiki figuring things out (though, at least the wiki is exceedingly intricate and well made).

Content Lockout: A LOT of the content in the game is locked behind the Main Questline that it never tells you about. The specific quest that needs completed is "The War Within", which is locked behind a whole other series of quests and Mastery Level 5, which will take a casual player probably a little over a couple weeks to get to.

Trading: Although I praised the trading above, there is two caveats to it that requires an addendum, which is that the only way to effectively market items in this game is via using Warframe Market, which is an online third party website. You can go to a relay and market items there, but even though I've spent a few hours attempting to sell items that way it almost never gets any bites unless its Rivens. Speaking of which....

Rivens: Rivens are like capstone mods for weapons in this game. They're purposely random and incredibly OP. Although I have nothing against them existing, there's a few things that I absolutely despise about them. The first part is pricing. Riven pricing is STUPIDLY complex, and it takes A LOT of learning to understand how to do it yourself. Because of this, there is Riven Appraisal Discords, Websites, and public chats for specifically this one thing. Rivens are also the devs way of influencing the meta through the disposition system; basically, the worse a weapon is, the higher the maximum stats on the Riven are allowed to be. This means that if you like a popular weapon, that the chances are that A: Rivens for that weapons are proportionately increased because of the supply/demand, and B: That the cost of God-Tier Rivens for that weapon is well above anyones pay grade. A good Riven depending on the Weapon can range anywhere from 50 of the premium currency (about $5 USD) to around 2000 ($100 USD) or even more. And even on top of that, Rivens are also Mastery locked, ranging from Mastery 8 all the way up to 16. To give you an idea of how annoying Mastery is to level, with the amount of time as of writing this post, I'm currently only Mastery 12. Yikes. Admittedly, I could be quite a bit higher, but I like to enjoy the games I play and so liked to stick to a few specific Warframes and Weapons.


Overall, I still recommend Warframe, with a couple caveats: You have to be willing to grind, and you have to be patient. If you can do both of these things, the game becomes very fun and has something to offer for almost everyone. Also, you should probably find a friend to taxi you around to make your early game bearable.

I realized that even after playing on this DLC for over 100 hours, I had yet to write a review on this DLC. Lets remedy that, shall we?

Machine Age to date is probably one of the best DLCs ever made, and I don't make that decision lightly. It's very rare for me to have no complaints about a DLC, but this DLC singlehandedly reworked how I fundamentally played the game after playing it for over 1000 some hours. There is just so many fun and unique ways to go about things now that just weren't possible before. So lets divide those things into parts, shall we?

Origins
One of the biggest changes is that machine empires and gestalt empires both get access to way more origins now. This is the start to the quirkiness that really opened up the game.

Individualistic Machines
This is the huge ticket item of this expansion. You can now start as a non-gestalt machine empire, with access to normal ethics and civics. This really made it so that Galactic Paragons as an expansion could really start shining, as well as making it so that weird combos of traits and origins can be achieved that just break the game wide open. You also keep trade as a mechanic, which is immensely helpful; and on top of this, it allows for spiritualist machines, which makes for some insanely fun and weird things you can do.

Synthetic Ascensions
This combined with the above two things is what really really broke the game wide open. Now, synthetic ascension gives you access to three distinct trees; Virtual, Modularity, and Nanomachines.

Virtual causes you to instantly fill all pop job slots on all of your planets, with massively increased resource production basically across the board. The more planets you have, the less this bonus is. This is basically the first time we've gotten a viable "tall" playstyle in Stellaris, and its actually very fun and refreshing.

Modularity is the biological ascension of the machine tree now, and has access to some pretty unique traits and overall is really strong on every front and a very adaptable ascension, with the trade off of not doing anything super unique.

Nanomachine is the powerhouse of the tradition tree, allowing you to slowly build an ever expansive military that will slowly overwhelm even your petty GPU card. This tradition relies on a starbase improvement that causes all celestial bodies to produce Nanites. Every 5 years, the yield of these improvements increase causing exponential growth. You can then use these Nanites for special buildings that utilize nanites as upkeep instead of whatever they normally would. They also get a special world type that uncaps all Mining and Generator districts, which is incredibly useful seeing as your nanite bases will pull A LOT of power, since their power scales with their nanite output. You then can use these Nanites to produce ships that have no upkeep; this means that no matter how far above naval capacity, they will never cause energy issues (as long as you only use Nanite ships.) This makes it incredibly powerful late in the game.

All of these ascension traditions are available for individualist machines AND gestalt machines, which is worth keeping in mind.

Cybernetic Changes
This is also a noteworthy change. Cybernetics now are completely reworked with their own long list of perks. Now, when you change your empire to cybernetics, you get an event chain that allows you to make decisions to push you towards one of two government types based on your authority. This adds another layer to the game for some weird playstyles.

Cosmogenesis
Cosmogenesis is a new crisis ascension perk that is available for any empire to take. Yes, I said any. This makes it incredibly fun and useful for a large range of reasons, and its unique structure the synaptic lathe can be as underused or overused as you want it to be. Conquer the galaxy and sacrifice 100s of xenos for Neuro chips and research, or pump a steady stream of your own pops ala Death Cult style into it for the same result. The choice is yours and its not even required. It also gives you access to fallen empire buildings, which are extremely OP and useful for min-maxxing and virtual playthroughs. (Worth noting, virtual empires however cannot put their pops in the lathe). Finally, it gives access to one of my favorite features, which is the Infinity Thesis. Basically, this is a repeatable technology with completely random effects. Some of them are amazing, some of them okay, and some are just downright wtf effects. Did I mention that the downright awful effects tend to do something to the entire galaxy? Its especially hilarious when playing in Multiplayer, where your friends just start randomly yelling your name every time something bad happens.

TL;DR
Just buy it. Its a great expansion if you enjoy variety and want to find new, unique ways to play and break the game. The expansion also adds some new early megastructures that are very useful for early in the game to snowball your empire.

Readers might have noticed I haven't said anything about the new crisis. I would say something about it, but being honest I haven't gotten the chance to deal with it yet. A lot of other people have already talked about it though, and since its something you can disable at the game start if its that much of an issue you can just make it unable to spawn. The crisis and having to manually turn it off, if it actually is unbalanced or buggy is no reason to avoid this otherwise amazing expansion.

Edit: Hadn't played the recent updates, so updated Nanomachine review.