The First Descendant - Review

With so many live-service games vying for your attention, The First Descendant feels like a focus group-tested, unabashedly derivative shooter that wants to please everyone and is fated for mediocrity as a result. It borrows tired ideas from better games, covers them in a thick layer of free-to-play annoyances, then pads the whole thing out with mind-numbingly boring and repetitive missions just in case you were still managing to have fun. That’s unfortunate, because underneath all that cheap wood and crumbling drywall is a really strong foundation, with entertaining gunplay and charismatic characters I’d like to get to know better. The First Descendant is by no means the first live-service game to come out of the oven half-baked, so there’s always a chance updates will make it more palatable in the months and years to come, but it’s off to an underwhelming start.

Developer Nexon’s take on a multiplayer third-person shooter plays in some of the same spaces as Genshin Impact, complete with cool-looking characters to unlock and countless currencies and materials to grind for – all of which can be bypassed if you’re willing to simply cough up your hard-earned cash. And, like some of its polished contemporaries, there’s a pretty decent game here in spite of a UI that requires a PhD in RPG hogwash to decipher and an irritating monetization model that does crazy things like requiring you to pay real money if you ever want to increase your inventory capacity. Running around with friends while shooting enemies and unleashing interesting supernatural abilities upon alien armies is an undeniably good time (as it is in Destiny, Warframe, and Outriders, to name a few) and the deep RPG mechanics and loot systems are a spreadsheet-loving nerd’s dream. It’s also a fairly pretty game that feels a lot more premium than one might expect from the free-to-play space, despite the occasional framerate dip or crash. That said, its monetization model is every bit as eyebrow raising as it sounds, the story and dialogue is laughably bad, and much of the campaign is packed with filler that can be a real snooze.

I’ve spent the vast majority of my 120 hours of playtime dashing around small hub areas completing repetitive chores in between much more substantial missions and boss battles against robotic kaiju called Colossuses. Those self-contained missions and bosses are exactly the kind of thing I hope for in an action-packed cooperative game: Some seriously awesome combat, interesting enemies to take down, and a loot system that had me regularly trying out the latest shiny weapon I pulled from some shmuck’s corpse. That said, even these more enjoyable bits weren’t without major irritations, like how nearly every boss has multiple layers of shielding that have to be peeled off before they can be damaged, most of which respawn multiple times or heal if you take too long to remove them. A few even have shields on top of their shields, so you’re constantly stopping what you’re doing to shoot a tiny target and remove a protective barrier, only to find yourself staring at another one only seconds later.

But those are still bright spots compared to the much more numerous missions you’re expected to do in between every story beat, which have you grapple hooking across open-world areas to complete intensely monotonous errands. These include a little minigame where you have to collect items from fallen enemies and deposit them into a collection bin, an escort quest where you have to follow a drone around an area slowly while fighting small waves of baddies, and several variations of missions where you’re just standing in a circle as you keep it clear of foes. Not only do most of these involve a whole lot of waiting around for enemies to spawn, but you’ll replay them in every new area until they are both tiresome and woefully predictable. There are so many missions like these, and it adds hours upon hours to a roughly  30-hour campaign that would probably be a quarter as long if it just went straight to the stuff that’s actually worth playing.

The vast majority of my playtime has been spent on repetitive chores.

Even if you can forgive the often trite missions, the story itself is consistently a waste of time and absolutely not worth paying attention to. Absolutely brimming with nonsensical sci-fi babble like “dimensional walls,” “inverted data codes,” and “unleashing Arche,” it’s one of the sillier stories I’ve seen in a while. Most of the dialogue is absolutely atrocious: At one point I burst out laughing when a bad guy menacingly declared, “Qliphoth will engulf Ingris. The roars of the Vulgus will fill this land with fear!” In another section I shook my head as an antagonistic character named Jeremy (a grown man with the voice of a whiney, spoiled teenage brat), showed up to be the most annoying person in the world and was mean to me for no reason while I ran quests for him. It’s truly heinous stuff and there’s simply way, way too much of it. Characters ramble on ad nauseum, retread the same plot developments incessantly, and absolutely never get to the point. Worse still, The First Descendant doesn’t even bother to finish its story, instead opting to stop right in the middle in order to presumably set up future content. Womp womp.

If there’s an upside, it’s that some of it is so bad it loops back around and becomes pretty amusing for all the wrong reasons – I eventually found myself looking forward to cutscenes, eager for the next hit of sci-fi gibberish and butchered voice performances just for a laugh. On top of the absurdity, the English voices rarely come close to matching the lips of the characters speaking. That’s fine if you enjoy watching anime dubs, but I find it pretty distracting.

Thankfully, the most interesting characters are those you can unlock and play as, like the unflappable electric speedster Bunny (my personal favorite), or the sarcastic and smarmy grenade-chucking soldier Lepic. Some of the cast do still seem a bit shallow, largely because you only get a little backstory and character development for most of them, but hearing them cheer as you blast monsters to bits and seeing their charming animations – which clearly had much more effort put into them than those of the NPCs – is quite nice. Only one of these playable characters has an actual questline associated with them right now (with more planned for the future), but that story is one of the better threads currently available, so here’s hoping they’re quick to add more on that front.

Actually learning to play as them is great, too. One character might control the battlefield with explosive AoE attacks, while another covers enemies in devastating ice-based debuffs. Bunny does insane DPS by running around as much as possible to generate electrical energy, then unleashes it in powerful blasts. Since each of the characters has their own style of play, switching between them offers a markedly different experience, like how Ajax, a heavy tank with protective abilities, is all about standing your ground instead. Most games with playable characters as its main chase live or die by how compelling those unlockable avatars are, and The First Descendent is loaded with distinctive options that are alluring to obtain.

The playable characters all cool, but painful to unlock without paying.

Unfortunately, aside from the first couple characters you unlock in the opening hours as part of early quests, the process of accessing the rest is dreadfully painful unless you’re willing to open your pocketbook. In the name of science, I decided to really dial in and see how much effort it would take to unlock one specific character from start to finish without spending any real money – the experience nearly broke me. First, I had to navigate the absolutely dizzying number of in-game currencies and parts I needed to grind for or craft and the respective activities I’d need to replay if I wanted a shot at those materials. In addition to both commonplace and impossible-to-remember currencies gathered throughout various areas and activities, character unlocks also require four key items specific to them, which usually only drop from a certain activity that gives you an RNG chance to find them every time. Then those items must be combined with other currencies and turned into more potent items, each with their own wait time at the crafting vendor to produce, before you can finally unlock the character itself. A lot of this process will sound familiar to any fans of fellow free-to-play co-op shooter Warframe, but The First Descendant has made it all even more exhausting (and it’s not exactly the part of Warframe I’d want to see others learn from to begin with).

For this character in particular (a poison-infused warrior named Freyna), I had to go back and do a bunch of chores I’d already completed, including one of the dreaded missions where I had to slowly guide a drone to its destination. It took more than twenty attempts until I finally got the key item to drop over an hour later – pure pain. But the real kick to the face came when I saw that one of the longer activities, a story mission called “The Shelter,” was the only way to get one of the other items I needed. At first I thought this wouldn’t be a problem, as it was at least one of the more entertaining pieces of content and the rewards screen told me there was a 20% chance at getting the item with every completion. That percentage, though, appears to be completely inaccurate, as I spent the next eight hours completing this mission more times than I care to remember without seeing the item drop. I wasn’t the only one in distress either – a Reddit thread full of fellow sufferers and some unkind words dropped into chat by those I was matchmade with revealed lots of folks were grinding their faces off to no avail. It definitely didn’t help that, like many missions, this one had two bosses, both with multiple layers of shielding that had a way of dragging out each completion for much longer than I had patience for.

I spent eight hours replaying one mission without seeing the item I needed drop.

But finally, in the wee hours of a very unpleasant night, at last I got the item to drop. With all the key items in hand, I raced back to the crafting vendor to put all the pieces together and get my new character… only to be immediately hit with a screen informing me that I now had to wait 16 real-world hours for the research process to finish. Of course, if I preferred not to wait, I could always shell out the premium currency to skip that artificial delay  – or, you know, I could have just bought the character outright from the start. Tired, frustrated, and dejected, I simply logged off.

I’ve gotta admit, when the alternative to all of this mindless, soul-destroying grinding and timegating is to simply pay $10, it becomes a pretty appealing proposition to cough up the dough – and that’s the problem. Seemingly in an attempt to make this free-to-play model work, Nexon has intentionally propped up obtuse, overly grindy systems that feel terrible just to make it more enticing to pay money. And when there are already paid season passes and a whole slew of optional cosmetics that can only be unlocked with money, did it really need to throw in an even more grindy version of Warframe’s character unlock system just to annoy me into paying more on top of that? Either way, trying to unlock a single character for free was an absolutely excruciating experience that made me feel a whole lot worse about The First Descendant despite mostly enjoying the actual gameplay.

Similarly, the weapons, equipment, and upgrades you earn while shotgunning your way through levels are awesome. Loot drops constantly, most weapons feel distinct and satisfying to play with, and watching the numbers go up as you modify and upgrade every new toy in your arsenal makes The First Descendant hard to put down… until it forces you into about 15 separate menus to juggle dozens of materials and so many different systems that you might want to keep your inhaler at the ready. This kind of thing is pretty typical for looter-shooters, granted, but even by the already gag-inducing standards of the genre, this one’s particularly obnoxious to learn – especially since the tutorial robot who shows you the ropes in the social area explains things to you in a series of texts that pass by quickly enough to challenge your speed-reading skills. Worse yet, these brutally obtuse systems have likewise been given the same arbitrary barriers as weapons, with various currencies and components to craft that can be made a whole lot less annoying if you’d just pay the piper.

Once you’ve worked your way through the campaign, you’ll unlock a hard mode and some uber-challenging Colossus boss fights that’ll net you better gear and put your character builds to the test. This stuff can definitely be fun, but it’s quite light on things to do at the moment, with most of it just being deadlier versions of existing content you’ll already have played a bunch by this point. Still, there’s plenty of potential in certain activities, like the handful of really cool bosses that are very scary to go up against and had my squads sweating it out to pull off a narrow victory. If Nexon can build on this in the future, with the bummer campaign content now behind me, I could see myself logging back in to check it out.