There’s still a hole in my heart left by the “end” I hit with Destiny. A part of me is forever wanting to go back, to continue the story and see where the game goes now that the big bad that’s been hovering over us for a decade is gone. The other part just wants to fill that emptiness with something else, hoping to find that spark in something else that I can then begin the journey anew again. The First Descendant looked like a decent fit for this, sharing some similar sci-fi tropes and hey, it was free to play, so it was worth giving it a whirl. What I’ve found is that it is no way what I was seeking and the target audience for this game is…uhhhh rather specific.
Realistic soft body physics enjoyers rejoice.
Humanity long ago settled Ingris, an alien planet where we thrived for a long time. That all changed when the Vulgus attacked, bringing with them terrible machines of destruction called the Colossi. When it was about to be lost the Magisters, a scientific faction within the Vulgus, betrayed their kin and joined humanity in the fight against them. In the process they discovered a long dormant gene in humans which, when activated, granted humans incredible abilities powered by their Arche. Humanity now finds itself able to mount a counter-offensive and not soon enough as the Vulgus appear to be close to their original goal: finding an enigmatic power source called the Ironheart.
The Unreal 5 engine underpinning the First Descendant is flexing all it’s muscles here, providing some absolutely incredible visuals for an open world game. The environments are brimming with detail everywhere which I honestly found a little overwhelming at the start. This is amped up even more with all the abilities, explosions and litany of other effects that will be spammed at you relentlessly. Despite this though performance is quite good as even in more intense fights the frame rate remained good. There’s other cues as to the game’s optimisation as well, like with the bigger boss fights being held in much more simplistic arenas. For a F2P game my expectations for craftsmanship were pretty low but, in all honesty, Nexon did a pretty great job here.
The First Descendant isn’t shy about throwing mechanics at you and boy, there’s a lot of them. You can see inspiration (I’m hesitating on putting the quotes around that for now, more on that later) from other titles throughout here: the gunplay feels like it’s based off The Division, the weapon levelling systems from Destiny and the class system from Warframe. In practice the game plays like you’d expect any third person looter shooter to: find enemies, spam bullets, use abilities, get currency or loot, rinse and repeat. The various supporting mechanics are all there to get you hooked on the various progression mechanisms you have available to you and get you sucked into the grind for the perfect build for doing higher tier content. These major upgrades though are all hidden behind our usual insidious F2P friend: the time gate. To be sure, you can enjoy all of this game without paying a single cent, but you’ll be waiting a lot longer than someone who sends a few sheckles Nexon’s way.
Combat feels good for the most part, striking a good balance between the efficacy of your guns and abilities. What’s not made super clear at the start though is that you should be churning through your loot pretty often, like after every sector you finish or after every major mission and dungeon. This is because as you rapidly move up the levels you’ll get access to better versions of your favourite guns, much like you do in The Division. You can quickly find your weapons hitting like wet noodles whilst your abilities seem to easily wipe entire hordes of enemies. This is when it’s time to shake things up a bit, swap all your weapons and mods for their higher tiers before getting back into the fight. I’ll admit this process takes up far more time than it should but it’s something to be expected in these kinds of games where the grind for god rolls is what keeps most players engaged for long periods of time.
Nexon have done a good job of ensuring that you’re always working towards a goal of some kind. Initially that’s just getting more levels and better loot under your belt, but you’re quickly introduced (via one of the game’s most hilarious characters whose subtitles go by waaaaaaay too quickly) to a bunch of other things you can work towards. Ultimate weapons and descendants are the first ones, but there’s also mastery levels (effectively your account level), descendant levels, weapon infusions, weapon rerolling and all sorts of other things that took other games years to implement. Like most of these games the number of mechanics that gets thrown at you is a bit much to start off with but they all make sense once you’ve figured out what each of them is there to do as a small part of the larger experience.
What they haven’t done though is make all the areas, encounters, dungeons, etc. feel distinct enough. Pretty much everything you do past the first couple hours is a repeat of something you’ve already done. To be sure this is the formula for these kinds of games and I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that’s sometimes what I want, just brainless fun, but it does mean longer sessions start to feel pretty repetitive. This is further amped up by the fact that the end game loot is locked behind RNG based grinds, meaning that you’ll be running a lot of the same content over and over should be chasing down certain components for a particular unlock. That was the killer for me, something which the game’s various scantily clad women with exaggerated soft body physics couldn’t overcome.
Nexon has definitely copped a lot of flak over this and many other sins that the game has committed. Whilst copying game mechanics isn’t anything new there’s a lot of characters that bear striking similarities to characters from other IPs. Whether these things are simply homages or something more egregious is an exercise I’ll leave up to the reader. Suffice to say though that this particular game is aimed at a particular audience, and they’re likely to enjoy the absolute shit out of it, whilst there’ll be a lot of others who’ll revel in pointing out all its flaws. Which side of the fence you fall on will come down to how long you can stare at dem booties before you lose interest.
The story could be good if the whole experience was a little more condensed. All of the sectors have their own story arc but you’d be hard pressed to follow it given how many steps you have to go through to get to the final dungeon encounter. It certainly feels like each of the sections are maybe 2 or 3 times longer than they need to be, needlessly padded out with more of the same kinds of missions. That comes along with a ton of extraneous dialogue, most of which has absolutely zero bearing on the story proper. It’s a shame really as some of the structure has been laid there to really give all the main characters more of a background but it’s all just lost in the wash.
Whilst my quest for a Destiny replacement might’ve failed here The First Descendant is a competent game, one that is suffering behind the shackles of what being F2P necessitates. Graphics are great, combat is fun and there’s enough progression mechanics available that you always feel like you’re moving forward. Variety is unfortunately low though which makes the core experience pretty repetitive. Couple that with time gated components and an extremely grindy end game and I’m quite sure this game has a specific audience in mind that’s just not that me.
Rating: 7.0/10
The First Descendant is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC right now for free. Game was played on the PC with a total of 8.1 hours playtime and 37% of the achievements unlocked.
