With so many live-service games on the market, First Descendants feels like a focus group-tested shooter that doesn’t hide its stitched-together nature. It wants to please everyone, and the result is mediocrity. It takes some old ideas from other better games, wraps them in a thick free-to-play shell, and then tops them off with super boring and repetitive missions to make you enjoy it.
It’s sad to come to this conclusion, because underneath all the broken pieces, there’s a very solid gameplay foundation. It’s a satisfying shooting experience and charming characters that I want to know more about. First Descendants is by no means the first live-service game to be broken at launch, so there’s plenty of opportunity to fix it with updates in the coming months and years, but this game is off to a rough start.
Developer Nexon’s multiplayer third-person shooter has some similarities to Genshin Impact, right down to the cool characters to unlock and the endless amounts of currency and materials to earn. All of this can be skipped if you’re willing to shell out your hard-earned cash.
Like many of its more established cousins, this is a good game at heart, but its UI is so complex that you’d need a PhD in RPGs to fully understand it. And its business model is a bit unfriendly, as even expanding your warehouse capacity requires money. Running around with friends, shooting at enemies, and using fun supernatural abilities to fight off alien armies is a joy (just like Destiny, Warframe, and Outriders).
The deep RPG mechanics and loot system are a dream come true for any data-mining player. Despite the occasional frame drops and crashes, this is a pretty good-looking game with graphics that are much higher than you’d expect from a free-to-play game. That said, the pay-to-win model is ridiculous, the story and dialogue are ridiculously poor, and many of the missions in the campaign are so sleep-depriving.
Most of my 120 hours with the game were spent running around a small hub area and completing a lot of repetitive chores, which were interspersed between key missions and boss battles against robot monsters called Behemoths. These well-organized missions and boss battles fulfilled my expectations for an action-packed cooperative game: amazing combat, interesting enemies, and a good loot mechanic that kept me motivated to pull the latest and greatest weapons from the corpses of my enemies.
However, even with these fun parts, the game doesn’t lack some major problems. For example, almost every boss has multiple layers of shields that must be destroyed before you can damage the main body, most of which regenerate multiple times and will regenerate health if you don’t deal enough damage. Some bosses even have more shields outside of their own shields, so you often have to stop what you are doing to aim at a small target so that you can destroy the shield in front of you, only to find another shield to destroy a few seconds later.
However, these things are relatively good compared to the large number of tasks you have to do as you progress through the story. In these missions, you use a grappling hook to move between open areas and complete a variety of extremely monotonous tasks. These missions include a mini-game where you collect items from fallen enemies and put them in a collection box, an escort mission where you follow a drone slowly through the area while fighting waves of enemies that appear, and several similar missions where you basically just stand in a circle and clear all the enemies around you.
Not only do most of these missions require waiting for enemies to spawn, but you have to repeat them in each new area until you are so tired that you know what to spawn next. There are so many of these missions in the campaign that the length is dragged to around 30 hours. Apart from these repetitive content, the actual content worth playing is probably only a quarter of what it is now.
Even if you can tolerate these extremely repetitive missions, the game’s story itself is a waste of time and is definitely not worth digging into. The story is full of sci-fi nonsense that makes no sense, such as “dimensional walls” and “reversed data codes”. This is one of the most idiotic stories I have seen in a while. Most of the dialogue makes no sense: At one point, the bad guy screams, “Cleaves will cover Ingrith. Vargos’s cry will bring terror to the land!” In another scene, a villain-like character named Jeremy (a grown man with a voice that sounds like an angry young man) appears, and the game makes him the most annoying person in the world, but then inexplicably asks me to complete tasks for him.
The plot is so bloody and too much of the same plot. The characters are constantly talking and repeating the same plot developments over and over again, never getting to the point. Worse, First Descendants doesn’t even bother to tell the story in full, but stops midway, probably to prepare for future updates. Hehe.
If there is anything good about the plot, it’s that some of it is so bad that it’s a state of extremes that things will inevitably turn out the way they are – in the end, I was actually looking forward to the next plot cutscene, if for no other reason than to see how funny they can be with their nonsense and poor voice acting in the name of science fiction. Besides being ridiculous, the English voice acting rarely matches the characters’ lips when they speak. This isn’t a problem if you like the voice acting like in anime, but I personally found it distracting.
Fortunately, the most interesting characters are the ones you can unlock and play as, like the calm, electric speedster Bonnie (my personal favorite) or the mean, quick-witted, grenade-throwing soldier Lepik. Some of these characters don’t seem to be very three-dimensional, though, mainly because you only know their backstory and have little character development in the game.
But it’s a joy to hear them cheer as you crush monsters and see their charming animations, which are clearly higher quality than the animations of other NPCs. Currently, only one playable character has his own questline (more will be coming in the future), and the story is currently the better part of the game, so hopefully they’ll add more content in that regard soon.
It’s also great to learn to control these characters in real combat. One character can control the battlefield with a blast area-of-effect attack, while another covers enemies with a devastating ice debuff. Bonnie generates electricity by running around as much as possible, then unleashes powerful explosions to dish out insane amounts of damage.
Since each character has their own unique play style, switching between characters can be a completely different experience, like Ajax, a heavy tank with protective abilities who’s better at standing still. Most games that rely on playable characters live or die by how attractive their unlockable characters are, and First Descendants offers players a lot of unique and eye-catching character choices.
But unfortunately, beyond the first few characters unlocked during the game’s opening quests, it’s a pain to get them unless you’re willing to shell out money. In the spirit of scientific rigor, I decided to go through the game to see how much time it would take to unlock a specific character from start to finish without spending a penny – and the experience nearly broke me.
First, I had to figure out the total amount of things I needed to get among the dizzying amount of in-game currency and materials, and figure out which repetitive quests would drop what I needed. In addition to the usual currency collected in various areas and activities and some materials with hard-to-remember names, unlocking characters requires four key items that are unique to them. These items are usually only available from specific activities, and have a chance to drop each time you complete them.
These items must then be combined with other currencies to make more important items. Each item has a different waiting time at the crafting merchant before you can finally unlock the character you want. This process should be familiar to fans of the free-to-play co-op shooter Warframe, but First Descendants takes it to the next level (and it’s not the design that I hope other games will learn from Warframe).
For the character I unlocked (a poison-using character named Freyna), I had to go back and re-do a bunch of repetitive missions that I had already completed, including a particularly annoying mission where I had to slowly guide a drone to a destination. After more than two dozen attempts, I finally got the key item after more than an hour – pure torture. But what really made me feel uncomfortable was that I found that one of the longer activities, a story mission called “Sanctuary”, was the only way to get another required item.
At first, I thought it wouldn’t be a problem, because at least the story missions were more fun than the normal ones. The reward screen also told me that I had a 20% chance of getting the item every time I completed it. However, this data was obviously completely inaccurate, because in the next eight hours, I had completed this mission so many times that I couldn’t count, but the item never dropped.
I wasn’t the only one who was suffering from the grind – there was a foreign Reddit post full of players who were also suffering here, and many players I matched with said nasty things in the game chat box, proving that everyone was grinding day and night, and the drop rate was not high at all. To make matters worse, like many missions, this one also had two bosses, and they both had multiple layers of shields, which made the mission time far beyond my tolerance limit.
Finally, in the early hours of a very unpleasant game, I finally got the item. With all the key items in hand, I hurried back to the crafting merchant and put all the parts together to get my new character…only to be greeted by a pop-up telling me that I had to wait 16 hours in the real world for the research process to complete.
Of course, if I didn’t want to wait, I could just spend the premium currency to skip this artificial delay — or, you know, just buy the character from the beginning. Exhausted, frustrated, and disappointed, I quietly quit the game.
If you don’t want to do these meaningless, soul-destroying monster quests and artificially extended wait times, you only need to spend a few dozen bucks. I have to admit, it suddenly feels like a good deal. But that’s the problem. It seems that in order to make this free-to-play model work, Nexon deliberately designed obscure and overly laborious systems to lure players into spending money by degrading the game experience. And with a paid season pass and a bunch of optional cosmetic items that can only be unlocked with money, does the game really need to add a more labor-intensive Warframe-style character unlock system?
The only purpose is to make me spend more money after I purchase said content. Regardless, unlocking characters for free is a painful experience, and while I enjoyed the gunplay most of the time, it only made my impression of First Descendants worse.
The game feels great as you defeat enemies to earn weapons, gear, and upgrades. Loot drops constantly, and most weapons feel unique and satisfying to use. And it’s addictive to see the numbers go up as you modify and upgrade new toys in your arsenal. But it doesn’t last long, and soon you’re entering about 15 separate menus to manage dozens of materials and a ton of different systems. You better have a respirator ready to catch your breath.
This level of complexity is common in loot-hunting shooters, but even by the genre’s already disgusting standards, this one is too difficult to get started. In particular, the robot responsible for providing guidance in the central area displays tutorial text at a rapid speed, as if to challenge your speed reading ability. To make matters worse, these extremely difficult systems are also armed with a kryptonite system. There are all sorts of currencies and materials to collect, and of course, all your worries can be swept away if you’re willing to spend money.
Once you beat the game’s campaign, you’ll unlock a hard mode and some very challenging, giant boss fights. These missions drop better gear and test the strength of your character’s outfits. They’re definitely fun, but there are relatively few activities to play, and most of them are just tougher versions of existing content, essentially missions you’ve already played many times.
Some of the activities still have a lot of potential, though, including a few really cool boss fights that were so stressful that my teammates and I had to work really hard to beat them. If Nexon can improve on what it has now, I’ll definitely be back to the game in the future after playing through the boring main campaign.
Conclusion
First Descendants has all the ingredients for a great looter shooter, but it’s overshadowed by monotonous missions, a poor story, and an annoying free-to-play model that takes the game down a rabbit hole. The fun of this game is killing aliens with fireballs and awesome weapons – but I spent at least as much time trying to understand the overly complex system design, which greatly “trained” my patience. Like other similar looter shooters, this online service game will hopefully be transformed into a great game for people to enjoy online time with friends through future updates, but it has too many shortcomings at present to be worth investing time in it