A Brand New Monkey God

I never understood why so many games have to have a Sun Wukong character. If you have a popular game with a multitude of characters to choose from and collect, there’s always some sort of monkey god. Warframe is no exception and they have not one but two Warframes that appeal to more Asian markets – Nezha and Wukong. While I’ve spoken about Nezha before, Wukong kinda sat unused in my arsenal for the longest of times, until his Primed self came out. Through an amazing stroke of luck, I managed to farm all 4 parts in 5 missions (and 6 relics), meaning I had a nice, shiny Monkey God Prime ready to go.

But honestly, I didn’t really care that much at first. I mean, I hadn’t even gotten around to putting a Potato or an Exilus Adapter into my original Wukong. He was nearly as unused as normal Ash and Hydroid, both of whom got deleted as soon as humanely possible to make space for the Primed versions I had waiting in my foundry. That’s why I didn’t really do much with Wukong Prime’s fashion-framing. I just slapped my normal colour scheme on him (yellow plating, grey and black under-bits and fleshy parts, blue metallics) and went on my standard E-Prime test run, like I do with all new Warframes.

The first thing I did was press 1. This spawned Celestial Twin. A copy of Wukong which basically worked like a specter but better. Celestial Twin quickly made me change my mind about caring about Wukong.

You see, Celestial Twin is actually useful. It’s basically a second player, using the same things you are using. Sure, there are other Warframes that can create minions to help them, but most of them are either stationary and slow (like Chroma’s pelt), nothing more than a distraction and more things to shoot at (Nekros’s Shadows of the Dead), too much of a pain in the ass to get decent damage with (like Nyx’s mind control targets), get slaughtered anyway (like Revenant’s minions) or require an augment and don’t last nearly enough time (just like Equinox’s splitting augment). Celestial Twin uses either your melee or a ranged weapon (the opposite of whatever you are currently using) and actually has its own health bar and things like that, being an individual entity. Oh, and Celestial Twin can shake hands with you.

Being an actually good clone that doesn’t require resources, Celestial Twin means you can do stuff without being pestered. Scanning for Plants for the Silver Grove quest? Let Celestial Twin keep things off your back. Fishing and mining? Celestial twin is there for you. Hacking a console? Celestial Twin will provide a distraction. Getting a little overwhelmed in a Defense mission? Celestial Twin.

And that’s before we get into Wukong’s other abilities. Cloud Walker is just all-round better than it used to be, except for the fact that it’s duration-based. Iron Staff now has more combos and looks and feels nicer. Defy is no longer a strange, Wukong-only version of Quick Thinking (stopping you from dying should you hit 2 health) and now makes you invulnerable briefly, with any damage taken being dished back out and converted into armour. It’s like Harrow’s Covenant but with armour rather than critical chance and damage.

Heck, even Wukong’s passive is more fun. You can avoid death and get one of five random buffs, up to three times per mission. The buffs include invisibility, extra loot and invincibility! That’s pretty cool and very fitting with Wukong’s theme.

I’ll be honest, I probably wouldn’t pick Wukong out as a main Warframe, but his rework did wonders for him. He’s a genuinely usable Warframe and now that he has a Prime, he’ll be even more popular.

9/10, definitely worth trying out. Losing 1 point because normal Wukong is pretty damn ugly, but thankfully the Primed version salvages that.