The First Descendant feels like a focus-group-tested, shamelessly derivative shooter that strives to please everyone and is doomed to mediocrity as a result, especially with so many live-service games competing for your attention. It takes stale concepts from better games, coats them in a thick layer of free-to-play irritations, and then packs the entire experience with monotonous, mind-numbing missions—just in case you were still finding enjoyment in it. That is bad because there is a pretty solid base with fun gunplay and interesting characters I would like to know more about beneath all that cheap wood and decaying drywall. Although it is off to a lackluster start, The First Descendant is by no means the first live-service game to be released half-baked. There is always a chance that upgrades will improve the game in the coming months and years.
The multiplayer third-person shooter from developer Nexon takes place in some of the same areas as Genshin Impact, complete with attractive characters to unlock and an endless supply of materials and currencies to grind for. However, all of these features are avoidable if you are ready to part with your hard-earned cash. In addition, the game is rather good, similar to some of its more sophisticated peers, despite an unwieldy user interface that takes a PhD in RPG hogwash to understand and a grating business plan that does absurd things like asking you to pay real money to expand your inventory. As in Destiny, Warframe, and Outriders, to name a few, running about with buddies while killing opponents and unleashing fascinating supernatural abilities upon alien armies is undoubtedly fun, and the loot systems and sophisticated RPG mechanics are a spreadsheet-loving nerd’s dream. Despite the odd framerate drop or crash, the game is also fairly attractive and seems much more premium than one might anticipate from the free-to-play genre. Nevertheless, the campaign’s monetization strategy is as dubious as it seems, the dialogue and story are ludicrously awful, and a large portion of it is filled with truly boring filler.
The majority of my 120 hours of playtime have been devoted to running about little hub regions and finishing monotonous tasks in between considerably longer missions and boss fights with robotic kaiju known as Colossuses. The self-contained levels and bosses in the game are precisely what I would expect from an action-packed cooperative game: amazing gameplay, intriguing adversaries to defeat, and a treasure system that would constantly tempt me to try out the newest, shiny weapon I had dug out of some jerk’s corpse. However, even these more entertaining parts were not without significant annoyances. For example, almost all bosses had several layers of shielding that must be removed for them to be injured; most of these layers respawn or heal if you take too long to remove them. You often stop what you are doing to shoot a little target and remove a protective barrier, just to find yourself staring at another one mere seconds later because some even have shields on top of their shields.
Verdict
All the elements of a great looter shooter are present in The First Descendant, but they are hidden beneath a mountain of tedious missions, a dreadful plot, and an annoying free-to-play approach that negatively affects the game’s design. When it works well, it is a lot of fun to blow aliens up with fireballs and a satisfying armory of weapons, but I also spent a good amount of time-fighting confusing design choices that stretched the boundaries of my prodigious patience. Like its competitors, this live service could develop into a far more consistently pleasurable way to hang out with friends in the future, but for the time being it falls short too frequently to make the grind feel worthwhile.
