Review of The First Descendant: Same Old Song and Dancing

Initial release date: July 2, 2024

Platforms: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows

Developer: NEXON Games Co., Ltd.

Genres: Shooter game, Role-playing video game, Free-to-play, Adventure game, Platform game, Adventure

Publishers: Nexon, Nexon Korea

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

I doubt I’ll ever become genuinely tired of live-action video games. I wish I were keeping up sometimes, and other times I’m glad I’m not playing them. Upon the appearance of Nexon’s The First Descendant, I was intrigued by what an online play-focused firm could provide. Not just gamers should be offended by the rise in live-service gaming. As we’ve seen in Austin with Arkane, it can offer secure career centers in development that aren’t entirely dependent on the sales of the upcoming game, but it can also completely destroy otherwise prosperous businesses. I was excited about The First Descendant because I liked the concept of giving the player some personality instead of starting from scratch. For better or worse, the experience I had did not live up to my expectations, and I came away from it just as skeptical about this sector as I had into it.

Depending on your perspective, The First Descendant can be reduced to a few simple tasks. You will mostly be moving the tale along in the early stages of your adventure, which consists of several distinct game kinds. To be clear, you will still be defending, killing, and escorting your way through the whole campaign; this is not a new form of gameplay. You’ll gather different resources throughout the route, which you may utilize to research new gear, weapons, and Descendants. You’ll spend much of your time switching between completing story tasks and returning to Albion, the core region, to do additional research, even though there’s still a ton of the game left for me to explore. The first step in the process is selecting a beginning descendant.

There are three starting Descendants, same like in Pokemon. Your starts are Lepic, Viessa, and Ajax; you might choose to put them in the lead. I decided to release Ajax, a large armor boy without any elemental affinity, who wears a complete helmet. Viessa is a woman who looks like she was made in a lab just to flaunt her huge boob window-adorned bodysuit. Who could overlook Lepic, either? I did, at least, for a while.He’s the most generic-looking white dude you’ve ever seen, and almost no one was playing him when I played through the game. A really enjoyable and practical skill set unites all three Descendants. Four active skills and one passive skill are assigned to each. I chose Ajax because of his ability set, which focuses on defense and AoE strikes. Even while I enjoyed playing with Viessa and Lepic, unless a fight expressly called for one of their elemental affinities, they weren’t nearly as helpful in some of the more challenging battles later in the game.

Once you select a descendant, the basic plot is revealed. Here’s where the Destiny parallels really start to stick out. What do you think? Humanity is nearing its end! The threat of an extraterrestrial species is always there. Hold on to your phone, though, because the player’s descendant and the Descendant Bunny have just discovered an Ironheart, commonly referred to as a McGuffin, which opens the guide, a sentient artificial intelligence that is attempting to assist us. The player doesn’t feel any sense of urgency at all while reading this dreadfully dull plot. Which is good since I could go at my own pace without doing anything to raise the story-hairs on the back of my neck. There are story beats that are so tedious that you’re glad there’s a skip button.

The gameplay is a different tale, even though the story is worth ignoring. The First Descendant’s third-person shooting features are generally excellent, especially when there is little network delay. My assessment initially leaned favorably toward how few network issues there have been, but things have become worse between the original draft and the revisions. In the open world, bullets won’t count at best, and in the worst case scenario, you’ll be in a dungeon when a boss fight starts and you start to clip about. The loadouts are a little more varied than you might anticipate because you can equip various weapon kinds and there is no limit to how many of each type you can have loaded at once. Similarly, depending on the Descendant you’re playing as, there are a lot of mobility possibilities and solid hit feedback when firing. Although using a grappling hook to gain mobility appears appealing, it doesn’t really enhance the gameplay for All Descendants.

I’m impressed with how grouping is handled because I’m going into The First Descendant alone and won’t be playing with any pre-arranged groups of individuals. You are primarily paired up with whoever happens to be in your instance and is attempting the same task when you are on story missions in the field. This is problematic because the social menu is the only way to find out if you’re in a dead instance. I was yanked out of the game on multiple occasions, only to be forced to play the story missions by myself when I came back. Usually, this wouldn’t bother me, but some of these tasks have erratic balance. I would regretfully get merked because of the near impossibility of solo missions due to enemy strength modifiers and overwhelming numbers. Once again, I would go in alone with a single comrade and destroy the enemy completely, finishing the operation in a matter of seconds. This could be particularly annoying since you occasionally have to replay missions in order to obtain fresh resources from the randomized loot in order to investigate new Descendants.

Gacha? Not at all. Not exactly. Although research takes a long time, all Descendants can currently have their research materials farmed. Oddly enough, The First Descendant’s level scaling is determined by gear level rather than a collective gear score, so battles that were first deemed challenging soon become unimportant. While I had a little more money to spend on the game, farming to unlock things felt much more satisfying. However, paying players should get many of these stuff much easier and more immediately than free-to-play players. Just be aware that you have the choice to forego some of the farming or to obtain Descendants prior to their customary unlock. I don’t think this is a particularly predatory store. Of course, there are also weapons, ammunition, battle passes, and cosmetics for your Descendants. Because the battle pass unlocks premium currency, finishing a full one will lessen the cost of the subsequent one. If the price of the next battle pass remains the same, the pre-season battle pass contains enough premium money to cover almost half of it.

Bunny is the second descendant you should unlock without having to pay the gate. She’s a pretty squishy, electric fast girl. By choosing the unrestricted path, I successfully unlocked four Descendants with minimal farming before finishing the game. Bunny, who may be unlocked through a story quest, is included in that. While the previous Descendants I unlocked, including my starter, did not have Descendant-specific tasks, Bunny does. This is something of a letdown. According to what I gather, there are plans for Descendant-specific tasks in Season One, although you would think it would be the top priority given that your player base was initially concentrated on just three Descendants.

The store’s selection of cosmetics is so vast that on multiple occasions I’ve been perplexed about whose Descendant was being used until I noticed the icon next to their name in the party. Regretfully, at the moment, much of it is just folks playing Bunny. It must have something to do with her freedom and some of her rather suggestive makeup, I suppose. Having said that, there are some really entertaining cosmetics, such as a dinosaur costume and a back piece I acquired via the battle pass that features a hamster inside a wheel. My grappling hook, which I had no idea had an initial skin throughout gameplay, received a skin after I completed the campaign. Despite being lovely and entertaining, these cosmetics bring up a whole different topic: price.

I find pricing in live-service games to be intriguing; the prices listed below are in USD ($). Since 2001, I’ve been a player of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and even when I’m not, I usually keep up with the latest updates. Though not all pricing structures are created equal, in my opinion, The First Descendant’s cosmetic and Descendant prices are about average. There are 300 to 900 descendants of the premium currency, which may be acquired in denominations of $5 (250 credits), $10 (500 credits), and $20 (1,000 credits). A small bonus is awarded to you based on the amount you purchase; the more you spend, the more it increases. There are tickets you can buy to turn the gacha, which will unlock a random descendant in its group instantly, but at $10 that seems a little costly. Premium currency goes up to $100 (5750 credits (5000 + 750 bonus). Ultimate Descendants can be purchased for anywhere from 3,000 ($60) to 5,000 ($100). Cosmetics can be purchased for 125 credits ($2.50) to 1,900 credits ($38). The battle pass itself is only $10, which is comparable to other battle passes; however, it includes premium money that can be unlocked.

I have a side mission to find the ultimate descendant, but I don’t currently intend to farm one because the research looks really exploitative. However, a Descendant must also invest time in addition to money. I think Nexon sees a problem with the live-service gaming target demographic—that is, those who value money over time. The key to unlocking a Descendant is research. In addition to spending time farming to obtain the resources needed to build the Descendant, you must also invest time in researching the Descendant.

Assume that you desired to access Ajax, the starter that I selected. To unlock him, a few items are required. You will first require his code, which is an object made of patterns of amorphous material that has the power to form into five various objects with differing probabilities. Before you can even begin investigating Ajax, there are three distinct items you’ll need to produce and research. I want to make this point clear before we go over the figures. After cultivating the amorphous material pattern for a while, you go face a boss that lets you shape the material ONE time for each victory. If you’re lucky, you might even find the item you’re after. Before you can start your study, you must accomplish this with ALL THREE materials (with a few exceptions; some of the materials for Descendants merely drop). We now calculate the time. Researching each object takes eight hours, therefore it should only come to eight hours since you can investigate five things at once, right? Assuming that all of your farming was successful and that you were able to obtain everything at once. You could be looking at three different study projects totaling twenty-four hours. except the study on descendants, which requires thirty-six hours for an ultimate descendant and sixteen hours for an ordinary descendant. Even if research is done passively and doesn’t require you to check in, it still takes a while.

Right now, The First Descendant feels like a silly good time. I’m still excited for additional gaming even after finishing the protracted campaign, which took me about 45 hours. Really, the only thing I can do is go over what’s in the game right now. I find it difficult to suggest a live-service game to anyone after playing titles like Anthem and Babylon’s Fall. However, the community appears to have benefited greatly from the game’s initial free-to-play nature. Even though I was ahead of the pack, I still had some trouble finding groups, but overall I was playing with friendly, supportive players. In matchmaking, I’ve never had to wait more than 20 seconds, and very few places are fully empty of people. The First Descendant has the potential to become a mainstay for many years if this continues and Nexon adheres to its roadmap and timetable.

Review Overview

Gameplay – 70%

Story – 68%

Aesthetics – 75%

Content – 72%

Accessibility – 70%

Value – 68%

Overall Rating – 70%

GOOD

SUMMARY: It would be difficult for me to advise against playing The First Descendant because it is free to play. I’m still excited to explore more of Ingris and find more Descendants, even after forty hours.