At this point, I’ve now played The First Descendant in three or four different beta iterations, and each time I’ve felt more or less unsure if this was something my friends and I would want to play, or just another science. -Fire shooter in a sea of similar games competing for our attention. After more than 45 hours immersed in a pre-launch build over the past week, I’m a little closer to answering that question – but I’m certainly not having a bad time. I’ve got a lot left to play, including the all-important last game, for example, so I’m still not sure if The First Descendant will be my next heist-shooter obsession, or another one that gets lost . the sign.
Nexon’s free-to-play third-person multiplayer game is played in the same space as The influence of Genshin, complete with cute characters to unlock and countless coins and materials to grind, all of which can be skipped by those just willing to fork over their hard-earned cash. And like some of its polished contemporaries, there’s pretty good gameplay here, despite an interface that requires a PhD in RPG hogwash to decipher and an irritating monetization model that does crazy things like make you pay real money to increase your inventory capacity or get RNG consumable color packs just to change the color of your equipment. Running around with friends while hunting enemies and unleashing cool supernatural abilities on armies of aliens is an undeniably good time (as in Destiny, Warframe and Outriders, to name a few) and the deep RPG mechanics and loot systems are a spreadsheet Darling. fool’s dream It’s also a pretty good-looking game that feels much more premium than one might expect from the free-to-play space, despite the occasional framerate drop or crash (at least in its pre-release state). That said, the free-to-play model is as eyebrow-raising as it sounds, the story and dialogue are extremely poor, and most of the campaign is filled with filler that can be a real drag.
I split my dozens of hours running around small hub areas completing repetitive tasks between much more substantial missions and boss battles against robotic kaiju called colossus. These standalone missions and boss fights are exactly the kind of thing I hope for in an action-packed co-op game: some seriously awesome combat that rivals its peers, interesting enemies to take down, and a loot system that had me I regularly tried the latest shiny weapon I pulled from some schmuck’s corpse. If The First Descendant would just let me describe that part, we’d be on to something and the mind would be cleared.
Unfortunately, a lot of it is kept locked away behind sections where you perform a series of really boring tasks, like defending a piece of technology from waves of enemy attacks, collecting items from bad guys to deposit in a scavenger robot , or just killing things until a miniboss spawns for you to take out. Even the drug war can’t take away the boredom when it has you standing around for minutes waiting for small groups of enemies to appear until you’re told you’ve succeeded, then heading to the next place on the map to do it that. again. These sections make up quite a bit of what you do during the main story, too, presumably to smooth out the adventure so you don’t jump into the more interesting activities too quickly. Worst of all, there are only a few flavors of these types of quests, so you’ll be required to repeat them multiple times between each boss battle or more meaty story missions.
While I’ve only played half of the campaign, it’s not looking too good so far, fam. Absolutely filled with nonsensical sci-fi gibberish like “dimensional walls,” “inverted data codes,” and “Arche devastation,” it’s one of the dumbest stories I’ve seen in a long time. Much of the dialogue is absolutely atrocious: At one point I burst out laughing when a bad guy menacingly declared, “The Qliphoth will contain Ingris. The sounds of the Vulgus will fill this land with fear!”. In another part I nodded as an antagonist character named Jeremy (a grown man with the voice of a spoiled teenage boy), came across as the most annoying person in the world and was mean to me for no reason while I did research for her. It’s really disgusting stuff, but some of it is so bad that it’s pretty entertaining – eventually I found myself looking forward to the cutscenes, eager for the next hit of sci-fi trash and voice performances from cut off (Besides the absurdity, the English voices rarely manage to match the lips of the speaking characters. This is fine if you enjoy watching anime dubs, but I find it very distracting.)
Thankfully, the most interesting characters are the ones you can unlock and play as, like the speedy, insufferable electric bunny (my personal favorite), or the sarcastic, sassy grenade-throwing soldier Lepic. Some of the cast still seem a bit shallow, mainly because you only get a little backstory and character development for most of them, but hearing them cheer as you blast away monsters and seeing their cute animations – which they definitely had put in a lot more effort. in them than those of NPCs – it’s quite nice. Only one of these playable characters has an actual questline associated with them (with more planned for the future), but the parts of that story I played were some of the best content available in The First Descendant at launch, so hopefully they at least deliver on that front.
Actually learning to play as them is great too, although I still have a lot of characters to unlock before I can take them all for a spin. One character can control the battlefield with explosive AoE attacks, while another covers enemies in devastating ice-based debuffs. Bunny does insane DPS by running as far as possible to generate electricity, then unleashes it in powerful blasts. Since each of the characters has their own playstyle, switching between them offers a distinctly different experience, as Ajax, a heavy tank with defensive abilities, is all about staying in place. Most games with playable characters as their main pursuit live or die by how compelling those unlockable avatars are, and so far The First Descendent looks like it’s loaded with distinctive options that are absolutely worth going through the trouble to get. taken.
Similarly, the weapons, equipment, and upgrades you earn by shooting through the levels are awesome. Loot drops constantly, most weapons feel distinct and satisfying to play with, and watching the numbers grow as you modify and upgrade each new toy in your arsenal makes Descendants 1 hard to beat. thrown down… until it forces you into about 15 separate menus to juggle with dozens of materials and so many different systems that you might want to keep your inhaler ready. This sort of thing is pretty typical of heists, sure, but even by the genre’s now-disappointing standards, this one is particularly obnoxious to learn – especially since the tutorial bot that shows you the ropes in the social area explains things for you in a series texts that go by fast enough to challenge your speed reading skills.
Even after spending dozens of hours with this pre-launch review build, I have a lot more to play and a final game to dive into once it launches properly next week. Check back in the coming weeks for my final, bulleted review.