Review: The First Descendant (Patreon)

I’ve played over 40 hours of The First Descendant. I’ve finished the game’s main story and unlocked its hard mode, which is meant to serve as its endgame. I’ve stared at various options and looked at character builds to see which options might make my character slightly more powerful. I’ve filled and emptied my inventory hundreds of times, grabbing guns and reactors and whatever else any time it drops. It has the look and feel of a video game. But it also has the vibes of a fake video game from a movie, something the main character plays in one scene while he’s on the phone, probably lying to another character about being hard at work or “adulting heavy” or whatever. It’s free-to-play, it’s a mess of interwoven drop tables and grind currencies and unlocks, and it’s one of the most infinitely forgettable things I’ve played in a good long time.

This is a multiplayer game with social spaces and you can, in theory, see other players out and about in the field. You can join together in groups of four to take on various missions, the vast majority of which have you shooting things, sometimes while standing in circles to capture an area. The story, however, treats you as the mostest specialest one of the “Descendants,” or humans that have various elemental powers. The story paints you as The One, but you’re surrounded by other players who are also The One, and that occasionally makes the cutscenes and storytelling extra clumsy. On top of that, since you can play as well over a dozen different characters in the game and switch between them at will, you will probably find yourself in a spot where you’re talking to yourself and watching you give you quests. This seems like something that a modern game would at least attempt to address, but The First Descendant doesn’t bother trying.

(Sidenote: I love the way HDR looks when playing games but holy crap does it make any part of video or image work a chore. I converted this down in a way that seems to look similar to the original jxr file.)

Considering how ham-fisted and clumsy the story gets—even the captions are wrong at times, like the speech and the text are fighting each other to try to tell something resembling a cohesive story. I found myself thinking of Off-World Interceptor for the 3DO and wondering if anyone would ever release a game where they add Mystery Science Theater-style silhouettes to the bottom of the screen and just riff on their own bad story. Considering this tale’s third-rate, direct-to-cable quality, it couldn’t hurt.

So, then, The First Descendant exists in our modern context as a “podcast game,” a game where the action is so mind-numbingly straightforward and the story is so skippable that you might as well split your focus and do something else. I found myself watching wrestling in another window for part of my time with the game. That worked just fine. It probably says something bad about society at large that we’ve started to codify and sometimes even value this specific style of game, a game for multitaskers. Make no mistake, this third-person shooter has moments that are intense enough that you wouldn’t be able to check your email during a mission, but between the dull speech and the music, which isn’t awful but gets repetitive over the course of the story, you might as well be listening to something else.

The structure of the campaign is really straightforward and also weirdly repetitive. Each of the game’s zones—let’s say there’s eight or so because I really don’t want to relaunch the game to count them all—is broken up into a few sub-areas. Each sub-area tends to have around three main missions in it. So you get to an area, talk to a character, that lights up the missions, you go do them, and then move on to the next sub-area. Most of the missions are these incredibly brief, vapid little quests that feel more like the repeatable, throwaway patrol missions from Destiny than actual mainline content. These activities include things like “go where we tell you and shoot everything,” or perhaps “there will be three enemies in this mission that have bombs and you need to take each bomb to a power terminal to blow it up,” or even “here are a couple of different justifications for standing in a small-ish circle and waiting for a meter to reach 100% while you are being constantly attacked.” They’re about as one-note as it gets.

You’ll also unlock two larger missions as you make your way through each zone. These have matchmaking and are, essentially, missions where you make your way through some caves or ruins or a facility, fighting enemies as you go to fight a boss at the end. The bosses only have a few tricks, usually involving becoming invincible and spawning a bunch of balls above their heads, which you must shoot to make the boss vulnerable again. Go through three cycles of that and you win. Even the story’s final encounter is a slightly expanded riff on this concept.

Each area will also have a few side things, like an outpost that you can clear out for a chance at some items. The outpost repopulates one minute after you clear it out, so it’s designed for you to run it again and again and again until you get whatever it was you were looking for to drop.

Grinding for the right materials is a large part of The First Descendant. It’s handy that the game has a catalog of just about every item in the game, complete with a list of missions that might have this item in it. But once you start looking at the drop rates, you’ll realize that the game is going to want you to run these missions again and again and again if you’re hunting for a specific rare item. I don’t think I’ve had anything with a drop rate lower than 20% spawn ever in my 40-ish hours with the game. Also, most of those items aren’t directly usable, they instead feed into the game’s research system, which also dumps you right into the dark heart of the game’s philosophy on monetization.

Unlocking a character or an ultimate weapon is as simple as crafting it. However each character or gun is comprise of four different items. Furthermore, many of those items need to be crafted on their own, and each of those items requires four different resources to craft. Many of these resources are, just, like, 200 of a thing that drops fairly regularly, or at least can be reliably farmed from missions in the mission list. But even those lists have one item—a blueprint—that you’ll have to find. While you can’t directly buy guns, you can directly buy characters, allowing you to spend an alarming amount of money to unlock new anime ladies (Editor’s Note: there are also some anime dudes). For what it’s worth, the different characters do have different special attacks, giving many of them a fairly different feel… even if they all equip the same gear.

Oh, wait, there’s one more step to getting those blueprints. Many of them must be decrypted from a specific item. These amorphous materials are numbered, so you can learn that you need number 019 if you’re trying to get a specific blueprint to drop. So you look up where to find the blueprint, it leads you to this material #019, and you run off to collect it. But wait! These materials don’t just give you any item you want. Instead you’ll have to perform a task—usually one of the game’s boss fights—to get access to a decryption machine. Even then, the different items that the material can become have different drop rates. So you may end up with a 6% chance to see the item you’re looking for pop out of one of these goofy rocks. And if you stockpile a zillion of the same goofy rock, you can only decrypt one per boss fight, forcing you to re-run the same fight over and over again just to get another chance to roll the dice. For lower-level bosses, this becomes silly. You’ll drop the bosses in 20 seconds. It’ll take longer to matchmake and load than it will to win the fight. And then you end up getting the wrong item so you have to do the whole thing all over again? It’s madness.

Once you finally hunt down all your items, you can go to the research vendor and start it up. Naturally, this is a free-to-play game, so research takes time, and yes, you can pay to speed up that timer.

Upon finishing the game’s story, you unlock a hard mode, which levels everything in the game up to level 100, items included. While your character tops out at level 40, there are no requirements that link character level and item level. So it took about 10 minutes of re-running a mission or two to grab enough level 100 gear to feel like I was equipping the right stuff. The hard mode just presents these high-level encounters without any sort of additional storytelling. It doesn’t even force you to play through the story in order on this higher setting, it all remains unlocked.

This is where the game basically turns into a grindfest, where you need to decide what your goal is—that is, which weapon or character are you trying to unlock and where do you need to do to grind for those items—and then go do that over and over again until you’ve had your fill. If you end up hitting the level cap on a character or gun along the way, you can always prestige to reset it and make it ever-so-slightly more powerful in the process. Oh, but wait, crafting the items you need to expand or reset a character or gun requires you to rely on some of the lowest drop rates in the game to work in your favor… so, naturally, these items are for sale in the game’s shop. A prestige item is available for just over $5.00 (you’d probably something like 10 of these to truly maximize your power) and an item that allows you to equip more items that provide bonuses to your stats is available for just over $20. Naturally, with the way the game sells currency, you’d have to buy more premium currency than you need to get some of this stuff. Ugh. While I did find the story to be weak, something about the game just devolving into a full-on slot machine once it’s out of new things to show you felt way more repulsive than I thought it would. I guess that must mean that there’s something to this game, after all, right?

I found the moment-to-moment action in The First Descendant to be mostly fine and engaging enough. While different characters have different powers and some of them derive MP in different ways, the straightforward ice lady I picked at the beginning of the game ended up being fun, with one ice projectile that hits from a distance, one upward swipe of ice that hits up close, a fast (icy!) run that comes in handy when you’re running through the same tunnel for the 12th time in a row, and an ultimate attack of sorts that creates a big, icy cloud that straight-up ruins enemies. Every character gets a decent grappling hook, which you can use to zip along the ground in a satisfying way. On top of that you’ll get guns, the highest tier of which has unique effects that proc as you play.

The game leads you to the first one of these, a sub-machine gun that causes a electric explosion on most kills, damaging enemies in the immediate area. It’s handy! It’s fun enough. The main point is that having these abilities at your disposal mixes things up and gives you a few different ways to overpower groups of enemies. If you get tired of your initial pick, you’ll unlock an electricity-focused lady as part of the campaign who seems to be overpowered to the point where a lot of encounters get trivialized by an attack she has that just electrocutes everyone within a set radius. I also ended up unlocking a toxic-powered lady that shoots poison and a water lady that, ya know, shoots water. The variety isn’t bad! You end up feeling nice and powerful! But the game rarely feels like it’s actually challenging.

Most of the challenge comes from the the game’s “void intercept battles,” which are boss fights that you just jump into from the social hub. These are 4v1 fights against a giant foe, which comes with its own elemental resistances and attacks. The bosses also have weak points that you can shoot to weaken. Once they’re weak enough you can use your grappling hook to climb onto them and rip the piece off. It never feels necessary, but it’s kind of a neat little touch. These fights end with a pop of items that are level-locked to the encounter, making them usually useless, and the aforementioned crack at the machine that decrypts some of your weird rocks into items. The boss fights are neat, but almost feel like they fell out of a different game. It’s strange that none of these big encounters are worked into rest of the campaign.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and looks nice enough, though I found almost all of the character styles to be ultra-generic. The world itself isn’t especially inspiring, with areas like a desert, swamp, mountains, and plains all just kind of feeling like different color palettes. The blank stares of the characters only help to make the entire game feel sterile and contribute to that whole “is this a real video game???” feel.

Ultimately, I think the problems with The First Descendant are fundamental and unavoidable. A game that’s all about you making your characters more powerful that offers numerous ways to sidestep portions of that process with your credit card is already letting you know what the deal is: even if you grind your way to the top of the power curve for now, no part of that curve ever feels truly different or changes the way your characters shoot. The math just changes. But hey, you could always just buy a new character to level up, right?

The idea that they aren’t directly selling powerful items today doesn’t mean that they won’t start selling them tomorrow. Someday your endgame character will be back at the bottom of a new power curve. They hold all the cards, they pull all the levers, they get to decide how the game changes shape from here, and the cards they’ve already shown are not encouraging. Yesterday’s price is not today’s price, that sort of thing. While I think there are aspects of The First Descendant that make for a satisfying, if unchallenging time, it’s not exactly sound enough to feel recommendable, either. Add in the game’s desire to get you to re-run the same mindless content again and again to find the right crafting resources and you’ve got a pretty cynical framework for a free-to-play game that isn’t worth engaging with longterm.

2/5