At this point, I’ve played The First Descendant in three or four different betas now, and each time I’ve been no more or less certain whether this is something my friends and I would want to play, or just another sci-fi shooter in a sea of similar games vying for our attention. After sinking 45+ hours into a pre-launch preview build over the past week, I’m only slightly closer to answering that question—but I’m certainly not having a bad time doing so. I still have a bunch to play, including the all-important endgame, so at this point I’m still not sure whether The First Descendant will be my next looter-shooter fixation, or yet another one that misses the mark.
Nexon’s free third-person multiplayer game takes place in the same space as Genshin impact, complete with cool-looking characters to unlock and tons of currency and materials to grind, all of which can be bypassed by those who are simply willing to cough up their hard-earned cash. And, like some of its polished contemporaries, there’s a pretty decent game here, despite a user interface that requires a PhD in RPG nonsense to decipher and an annoying monetization model that does crazy things like steals your real money charge to increase your inventory capacity or receive RNG consumable dye packs to change the color of your equipment. Running around with friends while shooting enemies and unleashing interesting supernatural abilities on alien armies is an undeniably good time (as it is in Destiny, Warframe and Outriders, to name a few) and the deep RPG mechanics and loot systems are a spreadsheet -loving a nerd’s dream. It’s also a fairly nice game that feels much more premium than you’d expect from the free-to-play space, despite the occasional framerate dip or crash (at least in its pre-release state). That said, the free-to-play model is as eyebrow-raising as it might sound, the story and dialogue are laughably bad, and much of the campaign is packed with filler that can be a real nap.
I’ve divided my dozens of hours between running around small hub areas completing repetitive tasks, and much more substantial missions and boss battles against robotic kaiju known as colossuses. Those standalone missions and boss battles are exactly what I’d hope for in an action-packed co-op game: some genuinely great battles that rival their ilk, interesting enemies to take out, and a loot system that regularly had me trying out the latest shiny weapon I’d salvaged from some loser’s corpse. If The First Descendant had just let me play that installment as a mainline, we’d be on the right track somewhere, and my opinion would be made up.
Unfortunately, a lot of it is locked behind sections where you have to do a series of very boring errands, like defending a piece of technology from waves of enemy attacks, collecting items from fallen baddies to deposit into a collection robot, or just plain stuff kill them until a miniboss appears for you to take out. Even dope fights can’t stave off the boredom of having to hang around for a few minutes waiting for small groups of enemies to appear until you’re told you’ve succeeded, at which point you’re taken to the next spot on the map to do it again. These sections also represent a fair amount of what you do during the main story, seemingly supplementing the adventure so you don’t burn through the more interesting activities too quickly. Worst of all, there are only a few flavors of these types of quests, so you’ll find yourself asked to repeat them multiple times between each boss fight or meatier story mission.
Even though I’ve only played through half of the campaign, it really isn’t looking great so far, fam. Filled with inane sci-fi gibberish like “dimensional walls”, “reverse data codes” and “unleashing Arche”, it’s some of the most idiotic storytelling I’ve seen in a while. Most of the dialogue is downright awful: at one point I burst out laughing when a villain menacingly declared, “Qliphoth will swallow Ingris whole. The roar of the Vulgus will fill this land with fear!” At another point, I shook my head when an antagonist named Jeremy (a grown man with the voice of a whiny, spoiled teenage boy) turned out to be the most annoying person on the planet, being mean to me for no reason while I was doing quests for him. It’s truly awful stuff, but some of it is so bad it’s actually kind of funny – I ended up looking forward to cutscenes, eager for the next hit of sci-fi nonsense and mangled voice acting. (On top of the absurdity, the English voices rarely come near the lips of the characters speaking. That’s fine if you enjoy watching anime dubs, but I find it quite distracting.)
Luckily, the most interesting characters are the ones you can unlock and play with, like the unflappable electric speedster Bunny (my personal favorite), or the sarcastic and slimy grenade-throwing soldier Lepic. Some of the cast still seem a bit shallow, largely because you only get a little bit of backstory and character development for most of them, but it’s quite fun to hear them cheer as you blast monsters to bits and see their charming animations – which clearly put a lot more effort than that of the NPCs -. Only one of these playable characters has an actual questline associated with it (with more planned for the future), but the bits of that story I played were some of the better content available in The First Descendant at launch , so I hope they at least deliver on that front.
Learning to play as them is also a blast, though I still have a lot more characters to unlock before I can try them all out. One character can control the battlefield with explosive AoE attacks, while another blankets enemies with devastating ice-based debuffs. Bunny does insane DPS by running around as much as possible to generate electrical energy and then unleashing it in powerful explosions. Since each character has their own playstyle, switching between them provides a distinctly different experience, like how Ajax, a heavy tank with protective abilities, is all about holding your ground. Most games that feature playable characters as the main objective live or die by how appealing those unlockable avatars are, and so far The First Descendent seems packed with distinctive options that are definitely worth obtaining.
Likewise, the weapons, equipment and upgrades you earn as you work your way through the levels are great. The loot drops constantly, most of the weapons feel distinct and satisfying to play with, and watching the numbers climb as you customize and upgrade each new toy in your arsenal makes The First Descendant hard to put down… until it forces you into about 15 separate menus to juggle dozens of materials and so many different systems that you might want to keep your inhaler handy. This sort of thing is pretty typical of looter shooters, granted, but even by the genre’s already gag-inducing standards, this is especially unpleasant to learn – especially as the tutorial robot that guides you through the social sphere explains things to to you in a series of texts that pass quickly enough to test your reading skills.
Even after spending dozens of hours with this pre-launch preview build, I still have plenty to play and an endgame to dive into when it actually launches next week. Check back in the coming weeks for my final graded review.