The First Descendant | REVIEW

 

 "...The First Descendant: Some high fidelity assets coupled with some good shootin' and grindin'..."

PC | PS5 | XBOX SERIES

 

HOW I PLAYED: Mostly on PS5 with some time on PS Portal and PC. Played on Performance mode with Motion Blur and Frame Generation both off and all photos in this review are taken in this mode.

STORY - 12/15

INTRO

The First Descendant opens with a generic story which has the player pick between 3 different Descendants with their own strengths, weaknesses and play-style. The main story is forgettable but good enough. Looter Shooters are designed to replay/grind through the same content to get the right drop, so there is no surprise here.

CUTSCENES

Being an Unreal Engine 5 game, that is pushing high graphical fidelity, there is a lot of high quality cutscenes, these look stunning and are polished well. A nice touch is that (most) of these cutscenes will show your character exactly as it is and not in its default skin. As shown in the above photo, my pizza slice chest item is still shown in cutscenes, talk about immersion!

 

 

WORLD BUILDING

The First Descendants world has lore points scattered around with audio logs and information to gather as you play. The story itself is lackluster, but this game has a heavy emphasis on things other than the story. In the semi-open world, where you do various missions on the map, there is no wildlife and minimal flora. This doesn't affect the missions or gun-play but it does, however, leave the world feeling lifeless.

GRAPHICS - 12/15

CHARACTER MODELS

Beautifully polished and carefully detailed. This part of the game has seen the most attention. This game is in 3rd person for a good reason. So you can appreciate the look of your characters armor and weapon skins. 

 

ENVIRONMENT

The feel of the semi-open world is lifeless and uninspiring, the longer missions with teammates is more of the same and then the Big Boss battle arenas have a very similar look and feel. Adding pools of electrifying liquid don't "change up" the arena enough to feel fresh. The environments are of very high quality though, as shown below.

 

 

SPECIAL FX

The visual effects, from the electricity of Bunny, a Descendant unlockable early on, running around and zapping enemies, to the grenade explosions, are great. One thing I noticed was that some things, like boxes being destroyed, would fall at like 15fps. Like the animations had their own frame limitations. This was even on the characters arms sometimes in the hub area too, so I would like to rule it out as some kind of performance limitation during combat. The characters arms would sometimes move at the right speed but look like the game was running at a very low fps (but nowhere else on the screen was doing this at the time). A Bug maybe? (I will edit if it gets confirmed.) 

PERFORMANCE - 10/15

FRAME RATE

After a patch on PS5 the performance mode has been holding frames better, but it is still bad. The push to use Unreal Engine 5 on consoles for "easy" graphic fidelity has been at the cost of good performance, solid frame rates and stability. Sad to see. Steam users are reporting on bad performance, so its definitely not limited to consoles, however.

STABILITY

During my playtime there have been only a few small issues, other than frame rate. I have had a crash on both PC and on PS5. Both photos above and below were captured after the performance patch for the PS5 console.

 

 

NETWORK STABILITY

I have found getting into public groups easy and not experienced any issue in regards to drop outs, major lagging or other network issues while playing in a group.

AUDIO

 

ADJUSTABLE OPTIONS

A lot of choices for settings. Abilities to make certain sounds louder, or quieter, is great for these games where you are constantly surrounded in combat and there is sometimes 20-30 enemies on screen at once.

SOUND DESIGN

Sounds are good, but nothing really memorable or overly exciting. But the best part is how the characters say when their shields are depleted; a nice touch.
 

REPLAYABILITY - 19/20

MATCHMAKING

Plenty of other players around to join missions with easily and matchmaking for the Big Bosses has been less than a minute every time. It's actually harder to force playing alone than playing with others. All the Big Bosses can be soloed but in the semi-open world I saw no option to do a basic mission alone if someone in your area is on the same mission. The downside to this is when I was free-roaming, trying to do something else, the game auto-joined me to a mission... Fine, right? Free XP? Sure. But no, it stopped me from being able to fast travel... Annoying really. 

 

INCENTIVES

Grinding for loot! There is a lot of customization with Modules on weapons and your Descendants. While there is obviously going to be a meta-build for each Descendant/Weapon, there is still a lot of freedom of how to build for your playstyle. The top of the 3 photos above shows the Research Institute. This is where you go to get items, by "researching" them and this is one of the better parts of the game. Everything is extremely clear on how to farm items to Research new things. For Descendants you generally need 4 main items. So if you see what items you are missing and go to the "Access Info" menu and track them. NOT ONLY that, but the game also tells you exactly WHERE that item drops. Great, right? Talk about respecting the player... Also, there is a % chance for each item to drop upon completion of the mission/task etc.

 

This leads me to my first Casual Tip: If you are looking to farm items for something ALWAYS farm the HARDEST (lowest % drop) first. The reasoning is you want to burn the longest time first and if you give up, you give up with the least time spent farming the items.

NEW CONTENT

Being a new release this is all new content. But I will say that there is a huge range of things to buy and grind for, from Descendants to guns and better Modules for guns and characters. A lot of things can be bought with real money, but the ability to earn them is great in a completely F2P game.

PROGRESSION

The progression is good in the way it gives you a level for your Descendant, a season rank (for the battle pass) and another level again for Mastery; which affects all your Descendants. This is before you begin to upgrade guns, gun modules, Descendant Modules and so it goes on. The short of it is there is no shortage of things to work towards. Then there is also a "Hard Mode" to work towards. This gives you much stronger gear, for much more of a challenge.

 

 

Casual Tip 2: When you reach Level 40 you get an item to boost a single Descendants Module Capacity. But you can actually use this on any Descendant (Regardless of that Descendants current level)... Save the item for a Descendant you like... (Shown in the photo above)

 

GAMEPLAY - 20/25

 

CONTROLS

The developer, or team, who decided to put the action/select button as the same button as JUMP needs to rethink their life choices. This makes for absolutely frustrating situations of jumping instead of activating something that adds time to gameplay, in a very annoying way. A game like this, which is about grinding content over and over and getting through it as fast as possible, doesn't need little annoyances like this. Not to mention having a team almost wiped out and you are there about to revive a teammate and you run and accidentally jump... It makes you feel stupid and look dumb and leaves you frustrated.

 

MECHANICS

The grapple-hook is frustrating and puts me outside a door-frame sometimes and it doesn't pull me up the whole way up a cliff sometimes, either. The shooting feels good, I love the weak spots mechanic for Big Bosses and jumping/grappling up onto them to destroy a removable part is a cool touch too! Movement doesn't feel as fluid as I would like and the photo above shows the mechanic for some boss enemies. After depleting their health bar they summon floating balls above them and they are immune to damage until the balls are destroyed. These are simply  annoying to deal with, as they aren't fun and they don't inspire a feeling of having overcoming a challenge by destroying them. Sometimes they rotate through ball immunity too, so you have to keep changing which one you are targeting. Definitely my most hated mechanic of the game.

 

UI/UE

Some online games have a bad habit of overcooking their UI sometimes. But here we have a nice spread of information, without overloading or cluttering the screen and abilities have their button combinations clearly shown during combat too. The menus are intuitive and the photo above shows just how many random items the game has, but the developers made sure tracking items is simple, so that the player isn't overwhelmed.

 

SEASONAL MECHANICS

Being the first season of The First Descendant I will just treat this as the mechanics spread over the Descendants and the differences of playstyle between them. There are a lot of Descendants to choose from with two ways to obtain them: Grind or Buy. To save time you could just buy the Descendant who takes your fancy, I do wish there was a way to "try before you buy" with Descendants. What if I grind for an hour just to not enjoy that Descendant? I hope this is added later, even if the testing is reserved to the training simulation in the hub area.

BALANCING

The game has been out for a fortnight and I am yet to see any Descendant that is grossly overpowered to the point where no other option should be selected and no weapon type (handgun, SMG, Assault Rifle etc) seems useless. The developers have done a good job to balance these and allow people to use guns that highlight their play-style, Descendant, and/or build combination.

BONUS - 1/2

 

MTX PRICING

The pricing of the items in the store, from the Descendants, to their skins and items are all fairly priced for such a high quality game. The game being clear on how to farm items to unlock descendants for free is respectable. They are upfront about what the drop rates are (assuming they are not lying about the drop %...) and so you, as the player, can decide to grind or just buy.

Back to the "Research Institute" for a moment... The items you "Research" here is time gated. From a short 10 minutes to research some items, to 16 hours to research a Descendant. Now, whats the issue? That's all free, right? Yes, but you can also use paid currency to speed up this process. The tension here is the time gating may be patched to be worse and worse over time as we all dump hours into the game to squeeze players. "Grind-us-out"; if you will. However, I would assume players stacking up massive amounts of hours would be very much enjoying the game, so those players are possibly happy to pay for extra time boosts. Just something to keep in the back of your mind.

 

IN-GAME CURRENCIES

There are too many currencies. Regardless of the game being F2P, there shouldn't be so many different currencies for other items. Above I have photos of two off-set Battle Pass style currencies. One is a "Bonus Coin" and the other is a "Supply Coin". One directly requiring the Premium Upgrade of the Battle Pass.

 

 

TOTAL - 82/100

GREAT

 

The First Descendant features some high fidelity assets coupled with some good shootin' and grindin' with a massively high ceiling on Descendant customization and build options. They did something good here, with allowing players to grind for things, or fast track and purchase with real money. I would like to see some tightening up of the combat mechanics and traversal to really give this game some solid hours of gameplay. And fix those damn balls! Please, Nexon.

TL;DR 82/100 (GREAT) - This is a high fidelity looter shooter which prioritizes visuals and customization over a strong story and depth of lore. With good content and updates, this should carve out a strong playerbase over it's lifetime.