UNFORTUNATELY for the live service shooters, the studios that created them decided to release them all at once.
This means we’ve seen launches and betas for several games, including Once Human, Concord, Marvel Rivals, and the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
While everyone fights for the attention of the same audience, The First Descendant seems to have found its niche, with an all-time record of more than 250 thousand simultaneous players on Steam.
Its success is curious, as it does not appear to break the mold in any significant way.
The First Descendant is your standard shooter RPG where you shoot enemies to get better weapons so you can shoot stronger enemies.
His art style is also very bland. It’s not bad, but it looks like any other big-name game made in the Unreal Engine.
It feels like a game made by committee. It includes all the things executives think live service games need to make money.
Which brings us to our, and most people’s, biggest complaint about The First Descendant; predatory microtransactions.
All of the game’s resources can be obtained through grinding, but it also has a form of ‘pay to skip’ microtransactions, encouraging players to avoid boredom.
Despite all these complaints, it’s still engaging and you’ll feel the dopamine rush with the consistent weapon drops and mission rewards.
They drop so often that you’ll inevitably end up discarding most of them, but for the moment it’s satisfying.
Cosmetics are naturally harder to get, but this is the less aggressive side of microtransactions, where they are not essential to play.
The progression is also quite simple and satisfying. Picking up enemy weapons means you’ll always be powerful enough, and if a player enters your map, you’ll be paired instantly.
It must be this rewarding gameplay loop that keeps people engaged, because they certainly don’t stick around to watch the story.
The characters are instantly forgettable, and despite playing for hours, the game’s plot still eludes us.
The easiest comparison to make is with Destiny, which it’s similar to but third-person and sillier the more you play.
While The First Descendant’s gameplay loop keeps drawing us back, there’s 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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