There have been a lot of looter shooters on the market since the original Borderlands hit over a decade ago. We’ve seen Bungie’s take on the genre with Destiny and its sequel, while BioWare went full-boar into it with Anthem in the past five years. Now, Nexon has hit the ground running with The First Descendant, which aims to offer up more in-game storytelling than one may be used to in the genre. Things kick off with an exciting narrated video going through how everyone has to unite in some form to take out the evil Karel. Karel’s out to take over the world and the Descendants have to band together and take him out alongside his forces.
There are three different characters to choose from to start the adventure, with the slender Viessa being a white-haired warrior out to avenge losing everyone in her life, while Lepic is an everyman out to make amends for his dark past, and Ajax is a comparable beast compared to the two more regular human-sized characters and is a tank as well. Each fills a role similar to a hero shooter and it’s interesting to take an approach that works well in that genre and place it here. The group is out to grab three ironhearts to take out evil and end the great war that is tearing the world apart.
Right away, the beta starts off strong with a tutorial mission that showcases a lot of different gameplay types alongside showing off the integration of story and plot progression throughout. It reminds me a lot of what Destiny tried to do, but couldn’t because the lore was so entrenched in secondary materials. This very much feels like a story that would be at home in that franchise, but told with a cast of characters that we’re introduced to and given some backstory on in either the adventure itself or in-game menu options to flesh things out.
That’s even more impressive when you consider that all of this is evidenced in just the open beta, which does have a limited amount of content and yet still feels pretty feature-complete without much in the way of rough edges. The blend of shooting, platforming and grappling hook-usage is reminiscent of Titanfall while boss battles evoke Shadow of the Colossus. There’s a lot of bumper button usage as well to do things like more advanced grenade attacks and use the aforementioned grappling hook to traverse trickier platforming challenges or make taking out bosses more of a visceral experience.
The gunplay feels natural and using the Dual Sense results in an immersive impact when switching weapons as every major attack from a melee attack to a fast-paced semi-automatic shot to shotgun-style blasts with the sniper rifle from both close up and afar each feel different. Using the sniper rifle as a makeshift shotgun feels completely different to most games and reminds one a lot of starting off Titanfall and feeling like the auto-aiming pistol was going to be this seismic shift in FPS gameplay. Here, having a weapon this versatile and effective made me want to use sniper mode and that’s never the case in a game.
With a regular FPS, going into sniper mode takes a lot more patience and that isn’t how my mind is wired in a fast-paced game like that while here, the sniper usage feels a lot more natural. Movement with the left stick alongside an L3 dash all work nicely and getting around the world with jumps, double jumps and grappling hook-assisted jumps makes combat even more interesting. While you can hide behind things and rebuild health from fallen foes, it’s also fun to treat things a bit like Bulletstorm and use your environment in interesting ways to take out foes. I loved using the grappling hook on towers to send myself above foes and rain down gunfire quickly and effectively – it also made the grappling hook feel like a way to give the game near Anthem-style traversal without bogging the game down with flight formally.
The core gameplay feels smooth even with what little is playable in the beta and that bodes well for the full game. One area that impressed me a lot was the boss battle feeling so much like Shadow of the Colossus in broad strokes, but not feeling like a note-for-note knockoff of it like we saw in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow where it’s less an homage to a great concept and more outright theft. Here, you have the same basic goal of chopping a foe down bit-by-bit and using limb damage to be more efficient, but have a lot of different ways to go about it. If you want, you may use gunfire and grenades to weaken a limb and then grappling hook to it and deal out more densely-packed damage to a smaller area to cut down on taking damage too.
If you feel more comfortable raining gunfire and largely depending on evasion to avoid damage instead of weakening the enemy, however, that’s a fine option too. Having that flexibility makes The First Descendant feel like something more than the sum of its parts because it does present a few different well-traveled roads in terms of its gameplay in new and exciting ways because you don’t see those elements combined a lot. We’ve seen a lot of looter shooters over the decade, but I don’t recall any others with the emphasis on traversal like this one beyond Anthem and the execution of that concept is done better here than there.
The usage of Colossus-style mindsets for boss battles helps make those battles stand out more while still offering a lot of freedom to the player and having between-mission character interplay and a bit of world exploration feels a lot like Destiny as does the UI, but the more stripped-down scale and wise usage of a healthy array of characters instead of too much pure lore helps make the narrative seem more genuinely dramatic instead of melodramatic even with broad emotional ranges being on display.
For a beta, it’s impressive just how smooth the core gameplay is – especially with a screen full of enemies. There aren’t any framerate dips and you may alternate between either a higher framerate and lower resolution or higher resolution and more graphical effects and lower framerate. Each felt similar from a shooting perspective. There’s room for improvement overall. Things like the video tutorials do have an odd artifacting that gets in the way of seeing the action. The viewing window for it is also small and prevents it from being as useful as it could be. A simple full screen toggle button would help a lot there.
The First Descendant is due for a release this year and it looks promising – especially compared to other games on the market that aim to fill that same void. The world itself has more life than Anthem and the smaller, but denser story makes the Destiny-lite feel of the adventure work better even early on because you can spend more time with the characters. Gunplay should only get better with time and everything about the game feels like it will be a must-buy for anyone looking to get back into looter shooters.
