The First Descendant Review (PS5) | Push Square

pushsquare.com:

In The First Descendant, Nexon's new looter shooter, each character has their own set of abilities and gimmicks. Bunny, the first one you can unlock, has to keep moving to charge up her electricity which she can then use to fire off attacks. She does more damage the quicker she runs, so you barely shoot your gun, relying instead on her area of effect pulse ability. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the kind of playstyle the game encourages. Run past enemies, through levels, away from your teammates — go fast and skip as much as you can to get to the good stuff. The problem is there isn’t enough good stuff to justify spending time or money on the bad.

Looter shooters have a bad reputation for being too grindy, but when the core gameplay loop is satisfying, this isn’t an issue. Unfortunately, The First Descendant’s missions are repetitive, its guns lack any sense of uniqueness, its story is dull, and the Descendants themselves, while cool-looking and varied enough from each other, only have four abilities each which barely change as you progress. It’s all well and good building an experience around overpowered late-game builds, but players need a reason to want to use those builds.

Each combat zone in the game follows the same structure. You speak to a Descendant located at an outpost, then you go and do a few missions. These are all variations of killing enemies in an area, destroying generators, collecting orbs, or escorting a payload. It gets repetitive fast, especially when you’re trying to rush through to the end-game where all the best gear and builds are gated. This is a live-service game, so things will change over time and more mission types and skills could be added, but as it stands now, these features are lacking.

Even with repetitive goals, exciting combat can save a game like this, but it gets boring quickly. A Descendant’s skills level up as they do, but all that seems to happen is they do more damage or last a bit longer; there’s no tangible progression