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Soulframe has the bones of a great action-RPG, but I’m enjoying it partly because it feels too late to enjoy WarframeThoughts from a few hours in Digital Extremes' pre-alpha prelude
Thoughts from a few hours in Digital Extremes' pre-alpha prelude
Image credit:Digital Extremes
Image credit:Digital Extremes
I’ve been trying to work out if I’m keen onSoulframeonly because I feel guilty about missing the boat withWarframe. I reviewed Digital Extremes' hit free-to-play shooter in 2013, back when people were still calling it a spiritual successor to the developer’s boomerang-throwing action game Dark Sector. I didn’t like Warframe much at the time. Think I gave it a 6/10. Warp forward a decade, and that 6/10 game has become a thriving live service phenomenon - fifteenth on the Steam Most Played charts at the time of writing, and profitable enough to spawn its own annual TennoCon expo. It’s also become an intoxicating, confusing morass of dynastic sci-fantasy politicking and genre-shifting expansions, ranging from capital ship mechanics to questions of time travel, wrapped in layers of cosmetics that make Destiny look about as colourful as Gears Of War.
Soulframe Preludes: TennoCon 2024 GameplayWatch on YouTube
Soulframe Preludes: TennoCon 2024 Gameplay
Soulframe has splendid atmosphere. The prelude area is a sleepy paradise of wooded crags, winding brooks, thatched roofs and parapets. It’s a place of thick sunlight and vapour: there’s a full day-night cycle but it always feels like dawn or dusk. While nowhere near as rewarding to explore, the landscape is reminiscent ofElden Ring’s early Limgrave stretches both in the golden ambience and in the presence of aimless invading soldiers, who have set up poisonous braziers and clockwork gargoyles that fill the streams with quicksilver.
The costumes and interiors share Warframe’s opulence, with quilted cloth capes and armour that seem more appropriate to a harvest ritual than battle, but the opulence is relatively contained - at this stage in development, anyway - which gives individual pieces a chance to impress (I really love my cape). There’s also not a lot of people around at the minute, but the “Ode” enemies you fight have an amusing personality, squawking at you in their harsh, theocratic jargon as they advance brandishing curved swords and maces.
Image credit:Digital Extremes
If the staging is dreamier - your character visibly rises from pastoral slumber every time you log in - the melee focus is what really sets Soulframe apart from Warframe. The basics are basic: light and heavy attacks, a block and parry and a dodge. But they’re persuasively executed, with a discreet autolock that has yet to wrongfoot me, and some muscular, graceful animations that make a well-timed counter feel appropriately triumphant. Little touches sell it: when you defeat a warhound, there’s a nifty context-sensitive move where you knock away its helm to allow the beast to run free.
Aside from performing combos, you can lob your blade and call it back to your hand Thor-style, a superheroic flourish that also lets you slice cables to drop chandeliers and the like on approaching goons. You also get magic abilities (inexhaustible, but with a cooldown) in the shape of three spell slots, with options ranging from a forcefield to a linear earthquake spell that feels like bowling at skittles. Another little touch: when exiting spellcaster mode, your magic orb tumbles to earth behind you with a dink and dematerialises.
Image credit:Digital Extremes
