The online multiplayer looter-shooter genre has been dominated by Destiny for almost the past decade. We’ve seen multiple competitors rise up to attempt to knock Bungie’s behemoth off the throne with little success, and while I’m still skeptical about The First Descendant’s ability to do just that, there may yet be hope for Nexon’s new free-to-play third-person shooter.
I’ll get this out of the way quickly: when it comes to story and character-building, The First Descendant doesn’t even come close to Destiny. While Destiny doesn’t exactly set a very high bar for storytelling, The First Descendant seems to put its story and characters in the backseat, while letting the world and gameplay speak for itself.
I got to play through a demo build of the game, where I completed the tutorial and cleared all quests in the first major zone. You’re given a choice between three preset characters at the start, all with their own unique abilities. I opted to go with Viessa, who specialized in cryo and freeze abilities. They’re all armed with guns, of course, but it’s their abilities that distinguish them from one another.
As a fast-paced third-person shooter, I was immediately enthralled by how fluid and dynamic everything felt. With just a click of a button, I could instantly grapple to almost any high point in the environment, and quickly aim down the sights to start shooting. Abilities are triggered quickly as well, and when you’re in combat, it almost feels like everything passes by in a blur.
There are cooldown times for your abilities, but with how quickly everything moves, you’ll rarely feel it. Viessa’s abilities allow her to throw a freeze grenade at enemies, and generate icicles around her to slow down anyone who comes close. Her crowd control abilities are incredibly fun to use, and mixing them with the game’s more traditional shooting gameplay was a treat. The First Descendant also allows you to enter sort of a third eye view to pinpoint enemy vulnerabilities, and being able to freeze them and shoot their limbs off felt satisfying.
It also helps that the boss designs, in particular, are very unique. The adds that you’ll spend most of your time shooting down are nothing to write home about, but the bosses themselves feel like a real spectacle. The demo let me face off against a large humanoid tentacled monster unlike anything I’ve ever seen in this genre, and if the TGS trailer is anything to go by, there are plenty more fun bosses to look forward to.
Combat-wise, I love the way The First Descendant looks and feels. The gunplay isn’t anywhere near as crunchy or tactile as Destiny’s, but it’s fun, and that’s really all that matters in a game that wants you to spend hundreds of hours shooting and killing things. Of course, the longevity of a loot-based game depends heavily on how good the endgame is, and while I haven’t had a chance to really dive deeply into that aspect, the combat is at least solid enough to make me want to stick with it for a little while.
The customization system also adds a nice layer of depth overall, as there are plenty of mods you can affix to your weapons and abilities, which will give you various active and passive abilities to aid you in combat. These are mostly basic things like increased elemental damage or faster reload times, but seeing as how extensive the skill tree is for each Descendant, there’s a lot of potential here for more specialized builds as you get into co-op missions with other players.
Outside of that, The First Descendant isn’t without its fair share of flaws. Your quest-giving NPCs are dull as rocks, and most of the quests are pretty uninspired. They’re usually fetch quests, or “go to X area and kill Y enemies”, but again, because the gunplay is so enjoyable, I found myself zipping through these at a nice pace.
There were also a few odd bugs here and there, such as enemies or NPCs not spawning where they should be, and the entire game being in Korean when I booted it up a second time to load my character. This is just an early demo build, though, so there’s still plenty of time to work out these issues before the public beta.
It’s still early days for The First Descendant, but the game is looking pretty promising so far. Again, games like these live and die by how compelling their endgames are, and it’s too early to tell just how well The First Descendant will perform in that regard. Still, fans of the genre should absolutely keep this one on their radar for now.
