One of my favourite PC gaming experiences of recent years is hurtling down Mt Slope in Descenders without falling off my bike in spectacular limb-mangling fashion. It's the perfect "just one more go" game: think Tony Hawk or SSX, but with bikes. The main course was procedurally-generated trick gauntlets, but the sprawling hand-made bike parks—of which there ended up being dozens—grew to be the main course for me. I even quite enjoyed falling off my bike: sometimes my hapless rubbery avatar would go flying miles into the air.
A sequel, Descenders Next, is set to hit Steam and Game Pass in 2025. I was pretty excited about this news until I read the fine print: Descenders Next is an "evolution" of the original that will grow to cater for a whole range of extreme sporting varieties. When it launches it won't even have bikes. Instead, it'll focus on boarding sports: snowboarding and mountainboarding.
So, the sequel to my favourite bike game won't have bikes at launch, but hey, it'll may get them at some point in the future, and given the strength of Descenders I'm keen to see studio RageSquid stretch its legs. Descenders Next wants to be "the only extreme sports game you'll ever need", and it'll gradually get more styles over time. If you're put in mind of Riders Republic, you're not alone: Ubisoft's open world extreme sport outing mixed a range of different "extreme" disciplines including biking, snowboarding, wingsuits and even jetpacks.
It'll face some competition, but I'm actually confident Descenders Next will find its niche: the downhill biking in Descenders was definitely more fun than the equivalent in Riders Republic, with much looser controls befitting more precise (and dangerous) tricks. Also, the more competition in the "going really fast down hills" genre the better, because I love going really fast down hills in videogames and I know I'm not alone.
The other big change is how the environments work. In Descenders you were either on a procedurally-generated track in an otherwise featureless map, or in one of the game's handmade parks (basically theme parks for doing hectic stuff on wheels). According to Mike Rose of publisher No More Robots, there are a bunch of biomes in Descenders Next, each catering for one particular sport.
"And then scattered across each map is a variety of nodes, and the kind of node you pick determines the kind of level you’re gonna play," Rose told me. "So you start the game at a hand-crafted park, and then to find more parks and shops (places you can buy gear), you have to ride through the “off-piste” (procedural) nodes until you find another hand-crafted park node." In other words, procedural events and sprawling parks won't be discrete things in Descenders Next.
When it launches with boarding sports, Descenders Next will have online multiplayer and "multiple huge" biomes, with loads of customization to unlock and reputation to earn. If you're keen to join the online Test Sessions later this year, you'll need to sign up at DescendersNext.com.
