On the surface, Warframe supports this with a wide variety of mission types. I made my way through boss fights, infiltration missions (where I had to distract enemies while another tenno took care of ninja business) and campaigns to destroy enemy mining equipment. None of it is exactly revolutionary — I've seen versions of these modes in every online shooter I've played in the last five years. But that variety was the only thing that kept me invested long enough to level up, as combat is nowhere near deep enough to sustain interest in and of itself.

This is due primarily to simple AI. Enemies are all but brain-dead — even as the missions scaled in difficulty, I rarely encountered soldiers who didn't simply rush at me. Occasionally, the smarter ones ducked into cover, but even they were outnumbered by enemies who faced walls and simply let me shoot them in the head.

Warframe suffers even further whenever it steps out of the cookie-cutter third-person shooter mold. It advertises its melee combat and platforming as elements that set it apart, but neither are well-implemented. The melee attack — which you can charge up or simply let fly — was imprecise at best, and a button-mashing nightmare at worst. After a few matches, I gave up on killing enemies with melee, unless I was fending off a surprise attack in close quarters.

The platforming fares just as poorly — my tenno was nimble, but almost impossible to control once I was in the air. I was able to run up or along walls and perform acrobatic feats, but my tenno rarely landed where I wanted them to. As often as not, I ended up in a pit or stuck against a wall.