CHENNAI : Here’s the honest truth. I couldn’t possibly describe The First Descendant’s gameplay in any way that would convince you to buy it. It’s at best an average third-person looter shooter game.
It’s also mostly derivative, and you might be better off playing one of dozen other shooters that this title takes inspiration from. It has a half-hearted version of the grappling hook from the Arkham games, a weak attempt at boss-battles from Halo, and special character abilities that the Diablo series does better. But I think I am getting ahead of myself.
What is The First Descendant all about? It’s an MMORPG set in a dystopian sci-fi universe. An invasive alien race is threatening the future of the world, and as a Descendant in the region of Albion, you are called upon to fight them. You are sent on multiple missions to repel the threat.
Eventually, you level up enough to fight the tougher monsters. There are many different Descendant characters each with different playstyles. It takes a bit of time and luck finding the right collectible items to “research” the Descendant characters, but you would eventually be able to unlock all of them.
As the game progresses, you spend a lot more of your time on the game menus, tinkering with “module” combinations, and upgrades to your weapons. Later in the game, these upgrades make or break those battles with the aliens. The game isn’t without some fundamental problems.
The in-game AI is often weird and broken: I could be standing next to an alien for a full minute, and it wouldn’t detect my presence. It’s also quite restricted in terms of gameplay experience. There’s no tangible difference between one mission and the next.
You simply need to hold down the trigger button of a submachine gun and point it in every possible direction, and the mission is finished in minutes. The initial ten hours felt like a mindless grind, without much of a challenge. And this is me nitpicking at this point — but I did find the dialogue extremely dull.
It is just a bunch of sci-fi sounding words mashed together to form coherent sentences. The story didn’t truly get me to care about Albion and its thousands of human/cyborg residents, and I personally find this to be a limiting factor. But all of this really doesn’t matter, does it? Because I am not trying to sell the game to you.
And the developer isn’t trying to sell it to you either. The thing is you don’t need to buy it. The First Descendant, you see, is free-to-play.
It’s how things are in these situations: if it’s free, we will literally lap up everything they have to offer. I am guilty of enabling these games. I think to myself — it isn’t emptying my wallet, why shouldn’t I just pick it up and spend hundreds of hours on this game, even if it is objectively mediocre? A free game.
A hazy mist surrounds my brain. Suddenly, all the things that I would hate are now a beautiful gift. I love the non-challenging gameplay.
I still get all of the loot and rewards, don’t I? The broken AI isn’t a problem — it is so bad, that it circles around to become funny. The lazy storytelling is now bonus flavour text. I want the game to tell me more about the ‘quantum monolith’ and ‘data inversion’.
The unlockable Descendant characters made this experience even more tolerable. I got this character called “Bunny” very early on in the game, and I did love using her super-fast electrically charged powers that zaps the aliens to dust. Even so, these shining moments in the game are desperately too few, and you eventually get the sense that you are about to plateau in terms of progression to a point where the game makes you pay for it.
You can play The First Descendant if you a) have access to fast internet, b) play games on literally any platform c) don’t mind the eventual microtransactions..
