#battalyst

BATTALYST

(Due to the nature of the Sentients, some mild Warframe story spoilers may be ahead.)

The Sentients, as a whole, are very hard to wrap your head around. And that's good! In an industry that almost exclusively has easy to parse, relatively humanoid enemies, having some good old fashioned unknowable creatures is a welcome change of pace. In combat, every single Sentient is a flurry of limbs and bits and odd dangly parts. The Battalyst is no different. There's some clear bipedal/humanoid influence on the layout of the body and the posing, but in action, the Battalyst floats around and practically t-poses more often than it actually assumes this stance. It really does feel alien even in a game taking place thousands of years in the future. There are a couple of commonalities that I'll come back to a few times in these reviews. Namely, the use of shoulder pieces. The Sentients LOVE shoulder pieces. Light infantry, heavy units, even armless pipsqueaks mime some sort of shoulderpiece. Which works really well, because all of them are baller. It's a good thing the Battalyst has practically no head - it would decapitate itself if it ever had to gesture above neck level. My favorite design theme that runs through all of the designs is their "artificial organic" look. Our friend Batty here has a great example in its chest. The way its chest is a lumpy, natural-looking curve that extends out into appendages of unknown intent suggests two separate notions: it looks alive, like it grew these appendages over time; but also that it was clearly curated, as you can see with the sharp interior edges where an engineer needed that empty space for whatever space magic is going on in there. For a fourth faction between the machinelike Corpus, the tumorous Infested, and the bulky Grineer, the Sentients manage to carve out their own swath of space without stepping on anyone's toes.

Dude, Sentients Aren’t Even Strong. 

All they do is pick on people who can’t even fight them back. But the moment they face someone they Cannot abuse using their damage adaptation, THEY COWER IN FEAR AND RUN LIKE THIS ONE DOES. 

Re-uploading In better quality (Tumblr please don’t kill it lol).

Older captura but still one of my favorites.

Battalyst Valkyr and Battalyst kin.