UNFORTUNATELY for live-service shooters, the studios making them decided to release them all at once.
This means we’ve seen releases and betas for a number of games, including Once Human, Concord, Marvel Rivals, and the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
As they all fight for attention from the same audience, The First Descendant seems to have found its niche, with an all-time high of more than 250k concurrent players on Steam.
Its success is curious though, as it doesn’t seem to break the mould in any meaningful way.
The First Descendant is your standard looter shooter RPG where you shoot enemies to get better guns so you can shoot stronger enemies.
Its art style is also very bland. It’s not bad, but it looks like any other big-name game made in Unreal Engine.
It feels like a game made by a committee. It includes all the things that executives feel live service games need to make cash.
Which brings us to our, and most people’s, biggest complaint about The First Descendant; the predatory microtransactions.
All of the resources in the game can be earned through grinding, but it also has a ‘pay-to-skip’ form of microtransactions encouraging players to skip the tedium.
Despite all of these complaints it is still engaging, and you’ll feel the rush of dopamine with the consistent weapon drops and mission rewards.
These drop so often that you’ll inevitably end up scrapping most of them, but in the moment, it feels satisfying.
Cosmetics are naturally harder to come by, but this is the less aggressive side of microtransactions where they aren’t essential to play.
Progression is also pretty simple and satisfying. Picking up enemy weapons means you are always powerful enough, and if a player drops into your map you’ll be instantly paired up.
It must be this rewarding gameplay loop that is keeping people engaged, because they certainly aren’t staying for the story.
The characters are instantly forgettable, and despite playing for hours the game’s plot still escapes us.
The easiest comparison to make is to Destiny, which it is similar to but in third-person and more mindless as you play.
While The First Descendant’s gameplay loop keeps pulling us back in, there is nothing here to keep us excited.
If you want to read more game reviews, check out our Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn review.
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