"Then there are endless missions, meaning that you can keep them going for multiple rounds before extracting. These mission types can last for sometimes hours. One such mission is Defense, which is pretty self-explanatory. Defense missions are actually one of the best means of gaining Affinity, the game's equivalent of experience because it forces players into huddling together in a small area to defend some sort of object. The worst kind of Defense is Sortie Defense because you have to defend a MOVING target. Some jackass is just walking around aimlessly, and you're tasked to defend them for a solid 10 rounds! That shit blows! I wish the target would just stand still. Of course, you could always just use Loki to switch-teleport the target somewhere where the enemies can't get to and remove their weapon, which causes them to just stand there. That's better."

The camera pans to The Nerd, who's just sitting there with a controller in his hand. He doesn't look too mad but is kinda getting bored.

"Survival is another common endless mission type. You're tasked to survive while endless enemies bombard you for a bare minimum of 5 minutes before you can leave. The weird thing about this mission is that they try to shoehorn some nonsense plot into there, where you're tasked with distracting the enemy while a fellow Tenno steals valuable information. What Tenno? You'd think you'd see someone running around, but no, it's just a bullshit story. You're not distracting on behalf of anybody, all you're doing is killing enemies and making sure the life support stays intact, otherwise, the mission ends and you have to extract. If you don't last for 5 minutes or more, the mission fails.

"There's another endless mission type called Disruption, which is kinda like a gimmicky endless version of Mobile Defense. In this, you have to take these weird-looking keys and put them into these podiums, and defend them from these tanky kamikaze bombers. The game imposes positive or negative passives the whole time. The game mode is pretty fun, to be honest, but this douchebag, Alad V, who I thought was Alad the Fifth until I actually heard his name read aloud, keeps sending this shit called Amalgams after you, which is a combination of the Corpus robots, and another faction that I'll get into in a bit.

"Probably my least favorite endless mission type is Interception, mostly because it's just boring. You stand at 1 of these 4 bases as the enemy rushes the bases in an attempt to take them. With a good crowd-killing frame, you can breeze through it. It's honestly quicker to just play it alone, as you can capture the bases a lot quicker on your own, and it's the only way the mission is even remotely challenging.

"Excavation involves defending these digger things for a small period of time while they dig up a resource called Cryotic, it's alright I guess, but not all that different from Mobile Defense or Disruption to be honest, except you can speed the process along by activating multiple Extractors at once. These can all get pretty monotonous after a while. They're a lot more fun to play with other people into much higher levels where they're actually challenging. Just don't go too far.

"But not all mission types are selfish, in fact, sometimes we're doing something good for the sake of innocent individuals, such as with Defection missions... more like DEFECATION missions! This mission type sucks shit through a silly straw! You have to defend these defective Grineer called The Kavor, and they run slower than a sloth on tar after taking a Xanax. You can speed them up using several means, such as Wisp's Motes, and Nova's Wormhole, and you can heal them with Trinity's Blessing, so that's good, but this mission type sucks. The whole time you're doing this mission, some growly guy named General Sargas Fuk is yelling at you. He has some sort of speech impediment that causes him to pause mid-sentence. He reminds me of that wheelchair kid from Malcolm in the Middle.

"Only on the planet Eris can you find a mission called Infested Salvage, where you have to put these Antiserums into these machines while The Lotus hacks another machine. This is meant to keep The Infestation at bay so that she can get the job done. The idea is to keep all the bubbles at the maxed size and just wait and kill The Infested. It's kinda monotonous, but not too bad. If you stay outside of the sanitization bubble, eventually your armor starts to decay and you lose health, so be careful how long you stay outside.

"There's an endless mission type called Arena, which involves you running around a relatively small hub killing enemies. It's probably the closest thing to a standard deathmatch in this game without involving other players. At first, the enemies aren't too bad, but they escalate pretty quickly. This is actually pretty fun and engaging. The Grineer one is called Rathuum and features this tall, annoying lady named Kela De Thaym. She's this arrogant Grineer celebrity type that runs an underground fighting ring. Fighting here, you can get quite a bit of Endo. In the other one, the Corpus one, called The Index, you have a secondary objective and it's more accurately compared to a Gladiator mission type because you have to collect these points that drop on enemy death and cash them in at one of the endpoints. The more you hold, the greater the points on cash-out, but also the more you put yourself at risk, as you get significantly weaker. This mode will nail you tons of credits, the game's baseline currency, pretty quickly."

The Nerd puts his controller down.

"Man, all this talking is making me kinda thirsty, I'm gonna get some water so that all this Rolling Rock doesn't give me a nasty hangover. These shitty games give me enough of a headache as is."

He goes and grabs a glass of water and a nice cold beer out of his mini-fridge and plops back onto the chair. He sighs in relaxation as he looks at the camera again.

"Yeah, I know, this is a pretty long review, but you gotta wonder, how the hell have I been able to run my mouth this long about the game and not have mentioned nearly every aspect of it? Well, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There's a reason I've dumped 3,500 hours into this, and in order for me to finally feel at peace, I gotta do it, I gotta review the damn thing and get it off my chest or it will haunt me forever. So this isn't one of my usual rants that's just about me shitting all over an incompetently made mess. This is a good game, not great, not all sunshine and buttercups, but a very ambitious, but undeniably flawed game. But for some reason, I keep getting drawn back into it, like a zombie. I never had a game demand so much of my time. I've never been so willing to donate so much of my time to one, and I can't quite figure out why I do so with this one.

"I just gotta persevere. What's next. Oh, there are more endless game modes, but in order for me to talk about them, I gotta talk about the previously-mentioned open worlds. There are 3 open worlds and 1 semi-open world, kinda like half of one, and I'll explain why. The main 3 are The Plains of Eidolon, located on Earth, Orb Vallis, located on Venus, and The Cambion Drift, located on Deimos. These aren't truly open worlds because they're not necessarily big. All 3 can be traversed in their entirety in Archwing in under a minute. Before talking about them exclusively, let's go over what they have in common. All 3 have Fishing, Mining, and Conservation. The Fishing mini-game is pretty simple, but really annoying, and not because fishing is hard, it's actually really easy, you just light up the water with Luminous Dye, which you can equip to your gear wheel, and throw your spear at the fish, but what's annoying is you're constantly getting disrupted by the enemies, like, for real, fuck off!

"Mining and Conservation face the same problem, the enemies won't just leave you the fuck alone! These all have the potential to be fun little activities, but the enemies are just so fucking annoying! They seem omnipresent whenever you're engaging in extracurricular activities, but whenever you're actively looking for them, they're nowhere to be found! You know, now I don't feel so much like an asshole about blowing up their bases and stealing their shit!

"These open worlds all come attached to some central hub area where you can buy shit, trade, and engage in bounties. Bounties are like a series of standard mission types, except it's outside in this big sandbox, and their plot is centered around the people in that area. The Earth hub is Cetus, where you have access to two syndicates, The Ostron, and The Quills. The Ostron are these people that run a little trading town and are convinced that they're being protected by a holy being located in the mysterious tower off in the distance. They are freaky-looking, man. They hardly look human. They have this tan, very leathery skin, and their eyes are practically light-years apart on their faces. They far hard into the uncanny valley. There's this one guy that sells powders and dyes, and I've heard him so many times that I basically memorized his dialogue!"

Powders and dyes newly arrived at great risk from the Eurasian Zone! Display your love with a streak of Vermilion! Highlight those eyes with a dash of rare Cerulean! POWDERS AND DYES!

"All 3 main hubs have vendors where you can trade in resources, purchase various decorations, weapons, and Arcanes, and are tied into the extracurricular activities on the open worlds. The Quills are tied into fighting Eidolons. You can turn in resources obtained from doing that in to Onkko and use that syndicate standing to get Amps, decorations, and even more Arcanes. I think it's funny when you run up and talk to him and the game teleports you on top of the table before him so that he's just staring at your legs, he doesn't seem to care though.

"There are similar vendors on the other 2 worlds. The hub world connected to Orb Vallis on Venus is Fortuna. The story behind Fortuna is that Nef Anyo sold these people robotic augments, thrusting them into crippling debt that they'll never escape, so they are vowing revenge on him. You can do all the same stuff on Orb Vallis as you can do on The Plains of Eidolon, except that the big boss enemies this time are these two Orb Mothers, giant robotic spiders controlled by The Corpus that are used to oppress the people of Fortuna and that have their own dedicated boss fights in the form of specific Bounties. I'll get to them, but not before going into the next open world. Lastly, the two Syndicates here are Solaris United and the Vox Solaris, the latter run by Little Duck, who acts more or less as the Fortuna equivalent to Onkko.

"Deimos' open world is called The Cambion Drift and you got mining, fishing, and conservation here too. Note that each of these activities slightly differs between planets. The syndicates on this planet are The Entrati, a family of bickering, bitchy Orokin people that got consumed by The Infestation, causing half of their bodies to be destroyed. They're so dysfunctional! All they do is complain about each other like I'm supposed to fucking care! Get some family counseling, you basket cases! The other Syndicate, the Necraloid, is this weird robot that has two conflicting Cephalons trapped in the same body. One's a prim and proper fellow, and the other is a complete dumbshit. You can tell when the dumb one's talking because the body will spin around to show this goofy face etched onto the back.

The Nerd goes back to his ship and to the Navigation, which displays The Zariman in the top corner.

"Oh yeah, I nearly forgot about the Zariman. You gain access to this after completing the Angels of Zariman quest. It's pretty short, but you have to kill a pretty big pain-in-the-ass boss in order to beat it. The Angel's not necessarily hard, but the section where you have to dive inside of the Angel and knock down the shields as it recovers is pretty assholic. I can't charge through these spinning balls to save my life, and I always fall outside of the pit and have to go back in. Jesus Christ, what a pain! The Zariman is kind of like an open world, but only the hub world section. Here you can find yet another Syndicate called the Holdfasts, these ghosts of adults that used to be in charge of the Zariman that were all brought back by mysterious means, and they serve the same kind of functions as the other open world Syndicates. All the missions are isolated tileset missions and the bounties all take place within the tileset, so it's like a hodgepodge of a regular planet, and an open world."

"The Zariman has 3 new mission types. Void Armageddon is a Tower Defense type game mode, sorta like Plants Vs. Zombies, except you can move between several different zones and protect these things called Exodampers, that this asshole Cavalero will scold you for if you let them die. You build these turrets to help keep the enemies at bay using this resource called Argozene, but these do diddly fuck all, you'll mostly be relying on your own powers and your teammates to ward off the bad guys. Next is Void Cascade where you're tasked with purging these things called Exolizers of possession by these ghost-like entities called Thrax. This is probably the closest you'll ever get to being The Ghostbusters in this game, and it's a million times more fun than any of the shitty Ghostbusters games on NES, that's for sure. The last is Void Flood. This shit's kinda easy, you run around, collecting these floating cyan balls called Vitoplast, and you deliver them to one of 3 Void ruptures to close them. It's pretty difficult to fail this mode unless you have your head up your ass.

"I think what the developers of the game, Digital Extremes, the guys behind the predecessor, Dark Sector, and the excellent Unreal Tournament, intend to do is have an open world on the Zariman at a later date. There was this update teased years ago at the annual convention called Tennocon, which is like the E3 of Warframe, held every year in July, it's called The Planes of Duviri, and they had a trailer for it years ago but then update after update went by with no mention of it. You know what? The same thing happened with The New War, which was shown years ago but was only released a little over half a year ago as of today. For the longest time, they would show off these trailers for things that were nowhere even close to finished or even started. The same thing happened with Excalibur Umbra, which I waited 3 whole years for because he was so cool-looking, and because I missed out on the founder's pack that included Excalibur Prime, I would otherwise never have an Excalibur that wasn't just bland looking."