Game name: The First Descendant
Release date: July 2, 2024
Price: Free to play (with microtransactions)
Available on: Steam
Genre: Looter shooter
Developer: Nexon
Publisher: Nexon
Opencritic: Here
As a looter shooter addict, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in The First Descendant from the first time Nexon showcased it to the world a few years back. While the genre has never been exactly niche since it was popularized by Borderlands and Destiny, I can’t really remember the last time a new title managed to actually break into my “must play” list and tear me off Destiny 2 or Warframe for real. So if you show me a shiny new Unreal Engine 5 powered looter shooter and promise to deliver bombastic boss fights, engaging gameplay and a comprehensive endgame, I’ll obviously be interested, if only to see whether those boasts have any truth to them.
My first impressions with the game were fairly mixed, as gorgeous graphics and beautiful character models can only do so much when the story is clearly an afterthought, and server issues abound. The first week of play was punctuated by repeated network errors, with the occasional shader compilation stutter rearing its ugly head every time I unlocked a new area. This improved over time and now the game runs fairly well overall (though I presume once new graphics drivers are released and I update to them, I’ll have to experience those stutters all over again if I am still playing the game, but that seems to be an Unreal Engine 5 “feature” sadly). The server issues are mostly gone as well. Sadly, the story was what it seemed to be from the start and it never went anywhere interesting. There’s some really well done boss fights (that are also part of the endgame once you get far enough, unlocking harder difficulty versions of them) but if I had been offered the option to skip the story, I’d have done so in a heartbeat.
Gameplay-wise, The First Descendant can sometimes seem like two completely different titles at the same time. The gunplay, skill usage and movement are all extremely competently done and very fun. Shooting bad guys feels very responsive, abilities do what they are supposed to do in spectacular fashion and movement is always very responsive, though my initial impressions of the grappling hook were fairly disappointing (this ended up improving over time thankfully). Sadly, the other portion of the game (loot acquisition and weapon/descendant modding) is a mix of some of the worst parts of the Warframe grind, often without that game’s redeeming features.
Aside from my misgivings about the amount of things Nexon has taken from other games, another thing that disappointed me greatly when making my way through The First Descendant‘s story campaign was how generic most of the enemies we fight look, and how basic their AI really is. There’s no cohesive theme for the enemy types we meet, they are all variations of cybernetically enhanced monsters, or generic looking bioweapons with claws and weird protuberances. As the story progresses we get to meet some new baddies, but overall it’s hard to not feel let down by how soulless these foes look, and it’s even sadder that their AI mostly consists of literally spawning in predetermined areas out of thin air and rushing the player, or staying away and sniping, with no in-between. For all the complaints I have about Destiny 2, if there’s something Bungie have done well historically, it’s giving their AI combatants personality and cohesive unit tactics. Almost none of that can be found here, with the only exception being the Colossi bosses we get to fight at specific parts of the story, or during the endgame.
The basic framework of the modding system is directly lifted from Digital Extremes‘ long running looter shooter (guns and Descendants have limited “mod slots” that have specific polarities and they can fit a certain amount of mods, with polarities affecting how much space a specific type of mod takes, and mods affecting the equipment’s performance to a fairly important degree), and even more advanced mechanics are also essentially renamed copies of the Forma and Orokin Catalyst/Reactor systems (for those who aren’t used to Warframe terminology, Forma enables us to “polarize” mod slots so specific mods can take up less mod space, and the Catalysts/Reactors are ways to double mod space on weapons/warframes). Now, I’ve seen a fair amount of misinformation stating that the equivalents to these tools in The First Descendant are cash-only items and that’s very much untrue (they do require a fair amount of grinding, but that’s a given in a game of this sort). It is still a pretty annoying system, considering that you will need to work on a good number of weapons and Descendants if you intend to progress in the late game/endgame, but it’s not necessarily “pay to win”
Yet another thing that was mostly directly lifted from Warframe includes crafting timers for weapons and Descendants, which can range from a few hours to an entire day, and can obviously be “rushed” if the player chooses to spend premium microtransaction money on it. This means that you might spend an entire day’s worth of time grinding to get that hot new Ultimate gun, and then find out that you have to wait even more time to be able to use it (and level it up and mod it to be actually good, if you are at the point where basic guns don’t cut it anymore). It’s a system that preys on those of us who are impatient, while giving them nothing in return. In Warframe I can sometimes excuse it due to the existence of player-to-player trading, which allows you to get Platinum (that game’s premium currency) with items you got from farming, but don’t need (or need less than the new shiny weapon or frame). In The First Descendant there’s no equivalent system, which means your only source of premium currency is whipping out your credit card.
This is arguably one of the biggest issues I have with how brazenly Nexon has copied Digital Extremes‘ homework. They got a system that worked for a different game, and implemented its basic framework really well, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (why reinvent the wheel if it works, right?). But while doing so, they seemingly forgot certain aspects that, while apparently not being super relevant under a surface level inspection, end up making the whole thing a lot smoother for many players. And I get that all the gameplay portions of TFD can be experienced entirely for free, with only cosmetics being gated behind real money purchases. This is a fairly generous monetization system, right? Or rather, it would be a fairly generous system if we didn’t suddenly find out that a lot of those things are extremely limited for no actual reason. Want to get a paintjob so your Descendant’s new skin doesn’t look the same as everyone else who got that Ultimate Bunny? You can do so, but once you’ve used that paint, it’s locked to that character and that character only. If you then want to paint a different Descendant and wanted to use that exact same paint you’ll have to repurchase it. The equivalent system in Warframe lets you acquire entire palettes with a selection of paints that can be used to color any Warframe or weapon you own, with no limits. Why not copy that too?
Now, so far I’ve been fairly negative about a number of aspects in this game, which may lead readers to believe I hated my time with it. This couldn’t be further from the truth, no matter how much I despised the story or the crafting timers, or way the microtransactions work. The First Descendant is a pretty fun game, especially now that the servers aren’t dying every fifteen minutes or so. Would I recommend it to someone who has already spent a few thousand hours in Warframe? Not really. Anything you’d see in Nexon’s new looter, mechanics-wise is something you already know and might even be bored of. For Destiny 2 players things are a little bit different. While The First Descendant shares a lot with Bungie‘s long-running shooter (and I’m not just talking about the Ikelos looking sniper or the ability/mod icons) it’s at the same time quite distinct in many other ways and possibly a good way to experience some looter shooter action without doing the exact same things everyone’s doing right now (which mostly includes running around the Pale Heart opening chests to get new rolls of the exotic class items, a fairly mind numbing process, as I’m sure you all know)
As someone who’s played both Warframe and Destiny 2 for way too much time, I can’t really find anything The First Descendant does better that makes me want to switch to it. To me, this an extremely derivative game whose main attraction is its beautiful graphics and the novelty of not being made by either Bungie or Digital Extremes. Now, to someone new to the genre, or who hasn’t played Warframe to exhaustion? I can see them sinking at least a few hundred hours into TFD, and I wouldn’t consider that time to be badly spent.
6/10 – Fair.