I had not heard of this game until a week before it launched, when the marketing campaign took off, and I couldn’t spend 5 minutes without an ad for it to be presented to me on whatever app I was using at the time. So, when the game launched, I gave it a try since it was free to play and experienced for nearly 40 minutes until the servers crashed and weren’t back up until the following day. However, once the servers were back up and I continued playing, I began to realize something. As I kept making the damage number go up, I wasn’t having any fun, but I didn’t want to stop playing.
The First Descendant is a free-to-play looter shooter in the vein of something like Warframe instead of Destiny. I should note that I have not played Warframe since 2014. I have heard it has gotten better since then, so I won’t be able to make the more common comparison that is going around the internet to this game. The game takes place in the distant future, where two factions are fighting for control of a planet, and that’s all I remember of the plot because very quickly I lost interest as cutscenes turned more into white noise rather than interesting development. But the campaign took me around 15 hours to beat, and I should note that since this is a free-to-play game, I did not once hit a paywall, which was concerning because I was bracing myself for that moment, and it never came.
As for the gameplay, it is third-person Destiny gunplay; you have a gun and multiple abilities depending on who you are playing because you get one free character at the start and have to grind for each separately or pay $30 for another one. I took one look at that and never again touched it and beat the game with the base character. The game has no visual form of progression, you do have a leveling system but from my experience it was mainly for show. You level up truly by getting higher DPS stated guns, at first, I thought the guns were locked until you reached the level they were designed for, but nope you can be a level 5 and if you somehow find a level 80 gun you can equip it with no issues at all. But when you get to the mission structure, I started to be reminded a lot of Suicide Squad from earlier in the year, except worse, given the free-to-play architecture the mission design has taken, being nearly the exact same thing every single time with few forms of variation. But I did like how since it’s a shared online world, if you run into someone doing the same mission as you then you can join them or they can join you, this worked half the time. Whenever I would join someone, they would be wrapping up the mission, and I would show up for two kills and still get the full range of mission rewards. It would be great for people trying to speedrun the campaign, though.
Then you have the bigger “strike” like missions where you are tunneled through a narrow hallway with some random people, and it concludes with a boss fight, which at first were just wondering braindead bullet sponges, and then near the end, they expect you to have some form of tactics and the difficulty spikes like crazy, or if it is a bullet sponge boss, they will just add shield orbs that you have to take down to continue damaging the boss. The only issue is the game has lock on for nearly everything, except these orbs, you keep shooting like crazy to get some damage but end up missing or worse it’s a puzzle boss where you have to shoot the orbs in a specific order, and you end up wasting all your ammo.
But despite all of this I still beat the campaign, I think that was because of the social aspect with it being launch weekend, something I’ve avoided with these types of games for a while, but soon realized why people enjoy the social aspect. Because I had to join the official Discord to find a group to tackle the near campaign-end bosses, because that was when the paywall started to pop up from the bush. So, I wouldn’t say this is a positive on the game’s end because if you have groups that are mainly there to help people get past a hard bit, then you realize the game isn’t about strategy. It’s about who has the bigger number.
So should you try this, even though its free to play, no. Because this was not a fun game to play, this was a distraction game for me; there is a good foundation for a service here; I didn’t bother looking at the crafting element of the game since I heard it was a pay-to-win nightmare and once again like the additional characters didn’t even bother because I wasn’t running into any issues that couldn’t be solved with a help wanted ad on discord. But I can see this game getting an audience, mainly for the joke that this is a wannabe Destiny knockoff, but I can also see this game plummeting in player count once the hype dies down, and sadly, I feel like that is what will likely be the fate of this game.
Score: 4 out of 10
Reviewed on Xbox Series X