I recently quit Destiny 2 (for the second time). It’s been a love-hate relationship, never quite feeling like it was abusive, but always having that ominous sense it would head that way in a hurry. It’s not a weariness of the genre itself (I could always load up a Borderlands game if I felt the itch), but with Bungie. With their antics, their increasingly awful storytelling, with pretty much everything they touch. With that in mind, I approached The First Descendant with something of a jaundiced eye. I’ve done the live service dance too long. I’ve done the esoteric loot shooter bop more often than I’d care to admit. And for all that, The First Descendant practically managed to convince me never to pick up another live-service loot shooter again.
The First Descendant takes place on the world of Ingris. And, as one would imagine, it’s in trouble. Humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction from the double threat of the transdimensional Vulgus and the strange Colossi. The Dimensional Wall, which kept the Colossi out of Ingris, has been falling apart without any hope of restoration. A few decades back, humans discovered the remains of the Ancestors, a precursor species who developed extraordinary technologies which had apparently been used against the Colossi. With those technologies, super-soldiers known as Descendants took to the battlefield and started pushing the threat back. Humans now only need to find a clutch of artifacts known as Ironhearts to seal the breach, defeat the Vulgus, and make sure the Colossi never return. Of course, it won’t be that easy.
Visually speaking, The First Descendant is striking. Nexon and Magnum Studio have taken the Unreal engine and brought forth a variety of lush environments, elaborate weapon designs, and flashy special effects. The creature designs for the Vulgus are vaguely humanoid yet suitably menacing, while the Colossi are titanic and strange. Various equipment components and weapons look suitably appropriate for the quasi-sci-fi setting, yet still recognizable in one capacity or another. Much like Destiny and Warframe, the backgrounds looks suitably expansive and natural, making you want to explore beyond the confines of the zones you’re moving around in. However, in one important respect, The First Descendant drops the ball. Specifically in the realm of NPC interactions. You’re going to be talking to a lot of people as you make your way through the game, and invariably all of them have the expressiveness of a RealDoll. Worse, during conversations, your camera is locked on the character whom you originally initiated the conversation with, even if other characters are contributing but are not framed in the shot, or only partially and badly placed within the frame. It’s incredibly jarring, especially when you consider some of the face-to-face conversations you have are about “serious” topics, yet the facial expressions do not at all match the words being said or the tone they’re spoken in.
This brings us to the sound and vocal elements. On the plus side, The First Descendant has a rather well textured soundscape in terms of sound effects. Weapons are distinctive, though differentiating between two weapons in the same family doesn’t appear to be a possibility. One of the nice little touches I enjoyed was that one could get an idea of other players being in the area just by the sound of gunfire echoing across the map. There are well executed sound cues when certain important targets show up on the battlefield or when you’re performing certain actions. The soundtrack, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to really grab me. It’s hard to really notice it at all, which is a problem for games like this. Stirring battle anthems and well scored cinematics help sell the action. Yet I cannot for the life of me recall a single track that left an impression on me. The voice acting is a mixed bag. You’ve got some good performances, you’ve got some less-than-good performances. But there’s a serious aggravation factor in the respect that subtitles are imposed on every spoken word, yet the subtitles don’t always match the words being spoken. If there was a way to kill the subtitles, it wouldn’t be such an irritation. As it is, seeing how badly the localization teams did doesn’t exactly inspire confidence or joy.
Gameplay in The First Descendant hews more closely to the Warframe paradigm than Destiny. The perspective is third-person, though aiming down the sights of certain weapons flips to first-person just to make sure you’ve got your eyes on the target. There’s a good deal of run-and-gun basics, along with a grappling hook to deal with the verticality of the environments. Yet the basics seem to be tilted more towards the “run” than the “gun.” It’s actually novel having to seriously worry about ammo counts again after the “infinite kinetic” weapons of Destiny 2, but at the same time, it’s kind of a pain when you’ve got four different ammo types to track. Compared to the buttery smooth gunplay in Destiny or even the slightly less smooth feel in Warframe, the act of putting steel on target in The First Descendant feels undeniably sloppy. Even after fiddling with cursor speeds (which one shouldn’t have to do), there’s a sense of uncertainty about capturing a target in your sights. The variety of weapons certainly allows for a degree of “good enough” target acquisition for automatic rifles and submachineguns, along with heavy machine guns and rocket or grenade launchers. But the scout rifles generally feel unsatisfying. In what might be a first, I haven’t even touched a sniper rifle because I’m uncertain how it will actually play. And as a general rule, I love me some sniper rifles in games.
If this wasn’t bad enough, the actual mechanics of traversal across map zones exhibits serious problems. One of the things I loved about Destiny, and which made it so hard to walk away from, was the sense of expanse. You had big damned maps with all sorts of little nooks and crannies to poke around and find. There are gates in and out of hubs in Warframe, though its original iteration didn’t seem to have those. Yet The First Descendant has you on a narrative rail through a series of giant ring-shaped maps which (after you unlock the full zone) you cannot actually move through. There are clear dividing barriers/gates which break up the maps into smaller sections, but the gates behave like teleporters instead of simple doorways. It was apparently too big of an ask to let players move about freely and just ramble through the zones. Colossi battles aren’t much better, taking place in giant arenas that you have to access as a separate activity. The battles are kinda fun, but I can’t imagine trying to solo the damn things. I’m not that much of a masochist.
Worse, there doesn’t seem to be the sort of random “patrol” activities that Destiny used to make the maps seem dynamic. What you’ve got are the same mission activities you undertook during the main narrative to unlock the map, along with a couple side activities. You play them over and over again, grinding for a dizzying array of materials to craft components for various “Ultimate” guns (the equivalent of Destiny‘s “Exotic” weapons) or new Descendants. Much like Warframe, you’re unlocking new heroes by grinding for materials till you have all the parts you need to unlock some of the characters you’ve come across during the campaign. This is probably the second biggest failing to be found in the gameplay: the relentless grinding tied to gatcha mechanics that feel borderline abusive. The inclusion of a battle pass system only makes this more aggravating, particularly when it has to be one of the stingiest battle passes I’ve seen in a long time. Yes, the game is notionally “free-to-play,” but it lacks any mechanism for players to earn premium currency like Warframe or even Helldivers II, and this in turn inhibits everything from loadout presets to accelerating the “research” function which creates upgrade components.
But, as I mentioned, this is the second biggest failing. The biggest failing of The First Descendant is the narrative elements. The storyline for the campaign as it takes you through the various sectors is filled with hamfisted dialogue and trite story elements. It feels like somebody had a bad idea for an anime series, then somehow made it worse by adapting it into a video game. We’re just sort of thrown in to the story as one of the myriad characters who inhabit the world and expected to know certain points of history and background while being completely clueless about everything else. While there are lore items scattered here and there, it’s a lot less expansive or elaborate than anything Bungie or Digital Extremes cooked up. As lovingly rendered as the environments are, there’s no weight to the setting. The worldbuilding, both explicit and implied, doesn’t seem to have any heft.
More damning, we’ve got no great fondness for any of the characters we deal with. At best, one is indifferent. At worst, we’re wondering how the hell they haven’t been shot by higher authority or enemy action. I have the sinking suspicion that this game wasn’t originally conceived as a multiplayer looter-shooter, but rather a single-player action game. If my suspicion is wrong, then the notion of having a separate quest line to discover the past of a single hero character tells me this was basically narrative design by committee, and with completely predictable results. Combined with the localization issues and lack of emotiveness in the NPCs, and your potential for investment in the setting or the story is exactly zero.
The First Descendant feels very much like it was a rushed attempt to cash in on loot shooters before the bottom dropped out during the COVID years. It’s undeniably pretty, but it’s dumber than a sack of hammers in every other important respect. While it’s theoretically possible that it might get reworked into something better in much the same way Warframe did, I wouldn’t advise holding your breath waiting for it to happen. There are other games out there, and some of them are more respectful of the player’s time and energy than this.
Axel reviewed The First Descendant on PlayStation 5 as a free-to-play download.
