The First Descendant is an impressive addition to the online, mmo-lite, looter shooter genre. With stunning visuals, engaging gunplay, and plenty of endgame carrots to chase, The First Descendant takes some of the better aspects from games that came before and merges them into a more than palatable casserole. The First Descendant’s gameplay loop and incentivization structure are generally polished and fun enough that it may have the style and substance to keep players engaged for the long haul. However, the game is clearly designed around making the experience for players who are willing to throw down some cash much more convenient and enjoyable than if they were to attempt to play the game without cutting any corners monetarily. That core design flaw seeps into more aspects of The First Descendant than preferable and arguably holds it back from being something worthy of substantial acclaim.
One of the First Descendant’s strongest features is its genre-leading visuals. The game looks vibrant and polished, culminating in a wonderful exhibition of the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5, especially considering The First Descendant is an always-online, live-service game. The descendant’s physical features and outfits pop with pristine, satisfying detail on menu screens. Visual fidelity during gameplay segments can often be striking, albeit with some scarce performance drops. Three graphical modes are available on PS5: each offers a variation in fidelity versus performance. Performance mode offers the most reliable framerate, and I’d estimate it to be the best way to experience the often delightfully chaotic gameplay. Environments can sometimes be a bit drab or underpopulated, but otherwise, the First Descendant is a game that is enjoyable to look at to an extent we’ve not seen from other online shooters, outside of Destiny 2.
When it comes to an online looter-shooter, shooting is typically a large component of the overall experience, since players will be doing quite a lot of it. Thankfully, The First Descendant’s gunplay is excellent. The riddling of bullets feels and sounds fantastic with mild dualsense controller features utilized on PS5. Visual feedback is also great, with particle effects and damage numbers satisfyingly rippling outward from soon-to-be felled enemies. Descendants’ abilities, such as Lepic’s grenades and Bunny’s electric pulse, give that much more satisfaction to gameplay. I never really grew tired of short-circuiting enemies, and even if I did, I could switch things up and use Viessa to freeze them solid in their tracks.
To that end, the most enticing aspect of The First Descendant is probably its diverse cast of characters, which inject some of the charm and allure of hero shooters such as Overwatch and Apex Legends – each boasting a number of now iconic characters – into the slightly more mundane online shooter genre. They say variety is the spice of life. During my 65 hours with The First Descendant, I was able to play as the frost queen Viessa, the grenadier Lepic, the tank Ajax, the quartermaster Enzo, the good doctor Gley, and the speedy, preordained fan favorite Bunny. The variance between the characters offered a nice change of pace, and I heartily enjoyed having the option to use whichever Descendant felt right for whatever in-game incentive I was looking to chase. In the earlier hours, the First Descendant’s gameplay could certainly feel redundant and monotonous – that just comes with the live-shooter territory, seemingly – but having the option to juxtapose one hour of gameplay as Ajax the lumbering juggernaut with a subsequent hour as Bunny the zippy energizer made for a more than compelling reason go once more unto the breach.
Movement with Bunny is rather frenetic and unique and doesn’t quite feel like traversal in any other game. Conversely, having the ability to both call in drone strikes and replenish my own shield as the resourceful Enzo makes for a more than enjoyable tradeoff. There is ample opportunity for players to play their way – I’d even hazard to say that a player could find gameplay with one character entirely monotonous but another character almost too riveting to put down. In fact, that might be one of the biggest downsides of The First Descendant: that it mandates you curate your own fun. The campaign and endgame grinds on their own aren’t particularly engaging in the same way as a single-player narrative game, not that they should be, but finding something to chase and putting in work towards realizing a goal is one of The First Descendant’s most fulfilling propositions. It’s really just a playground sandbox where players can test the extent of a given character’s abilities, grind toward unlocking the next character, and then do it all over again, with most characters proving to be a satisfying and significant shift in style and feel from the last. It’s unfortunate, then, that more of that variety isn’t available from the start for a reasonable cost.
The most affordable descendants cost 300 caliber, the in-game currency emblematic of real money, but a $5 USD purchase will put you just 50 caliber shy of that mark. Outside of this, pricing is generally affordable – comparing rather favorably to The First Descendant’s live service contemporaries, even – but the fact that $10 USD is required to purchase what amounts to a $6 character is just scummy. Obviously, these characters can be earned and unlocked for free in-game, but for those who perhaps just want to sample the various descendant’s abilities – thereby maximizing their fun early on in favor of the slow-burn grind – don’t expect to acquire descendants individually through a simple, clean transaction. That’s not even mentioning the Ultimate Descendants, which offer tangible statistical and build-oriented benefits, along with a stylistic, exclusive aesthetic for the low price of $55 USD. To its credit, The First Descendant is a playground first and a whale hunt second, but it is both.
When reviewing a game intended to keep players engaged for the long term (at least if it is to find any measurable level of success) one has to assess whether the game has the content to do just that. The First Descendant will likely live or die by its endgame activities, which thankfully are not in short supply. To that end, the First Descendant offers players the ability to replay story missions on a harder difficulty with the incentive of increased rewards of higher value and rarity than those available during the normal campaign. There are also Infiltration missions, which are a mix of recycled campaign dungeons and some ostensibly new side missions that have a compelling risk-reward mechanic in the form of optional modifiers.
Before launching into an Infiltration mission, players can select various modifiers – such as increased enemy health – to be active during the mission which can increase the player’s overall score for the mission, yielding additional or higher tier rewards. Special Operation missions are focused on combat usually in the “kill all the enemies” or “defend the point” variety. They are wave-based or interval-based missions where players attempt to conquer and persevere as far as manageable before reaching a fail state and ultimately cashing out with rewards. To round out the endgame are the Void Intercept Battles which are boss fights against big monstrosities that often function like miniature raids.
There is a time limit to kill the boss and the encounters are designed so that team composition and cooperation are mandatory to vanquish the bosses at high levels. Among the rewards for these activities are components and reactors. Components provide bonuses such as additional health or damage type resistances and even can provide set bonuses if multiple components in the same set are equipped. There are also reactors, which increase the power of Descendants’ skills and abilities. Reactors are only compatible with specific descendants, for instance, a reactor that boosts fire-based skills would be much better utilized by Lepic or Esiemo than Viessa. Once acquired, reactors can also be upgraded using consumable items to increase their stats. Components and reactors both provide methods to boost a Descendant’s capabilities, as do mods aka modules.
Additionally, all of the endgame activities can also drop materials that are essential for crafting new weapons and descendants, even the Ultimate Descendants which can alternatively be bought for $55 USD. Bought or earned, the Ultimate Descendants provide the capacity to combine more mods in more interesting ways, for greater build potency. Farming Infiltrations, Special Operations, and Void Intercept Battles for specific materials to craft weapons, descendants, and boons is a grind that could take countless hours without considerable luck.
Herein lies the biggest problem with The First Descendant: virtually all of the aforementioned grinds are designed to be easily circumvented through the payment of real money microtransactions. Want more equipment and module slots? Want a boost to weapon and material drops to cut down on the time devoted to farming? How about a bundle of crafting resources or consumables to upgrade that piece of gear you really like? How about being able to play as a new Descendant without dedicating hours of gameplay to obtaining the required components? All of these issues can be instantly solved by handing over real money.
Now obviously this would essentially amount to paying for the privilege of not playing the game, but when a game is intentionally designed with elongated progression mechanics and systems, it can be inherently demoralizing to engage with those systems knowing that all your additional effort isn’t necessary. There are so many opportunities to purchase a shortcut or convenience; it’s abundantly clear The First Descendant was designed with those purchases in mind. To be clear, it’s not that the opportunity to make a time-saving purchase is ever shoved into the player’s face; rather, the effects of those monetization opportunities simply existing are evident in every aspect of The First Descendant’s progression and design. They are inescapable to the perceptive player. There is really no way to overlook these types of design choices. While they can be expected in a free to-play game, that doesn’t make them suck any less or make the aspects of the game designed to coerce players into spending money any more enjoyable.
There is so much that the First Descendant does right, as is evidenced by how visually striking and mechanically engaging the online looter-shooter can be. The descendants’ varying personalities and capabilities provide a unique flourish to a somewhat played-out genre. Likewise, a wealth of endgame activities and possibilities should keep resilient players engaged after completing the campaign. It really is a testament to The First Descendant’s strongest attributes that the game isn’t completely undone by its intentional redundancy and overt design emphasis on grind mitigating monetization. Caveat emptor, but the First Descendant can still be enjoyed for all its best elements, in spite of its shortcomings. While emerging onto the live shooter scene considerably scathed by self-inflicted design flaws, The First Descendant still manages to be one of the better offerings in the online looter-shooter genre.
-Kirkland Gray
