The First Descendant has been one of the big releases in gaming recently. It's marketed as the next big looter shooter which is a genre that I've enjoyed a lot in the past through both Destiny and Warframe. I most likely have around 1000 hours played across those two games. The reviews for The First Descendant haven't been the best but I decided I wanted to see it with my own eyes instead of blindly trusting those reviews.
Decent experience
After having played the game for roughly four hours I can say that the game is a decent experience. It has its shortcomings that I will be mentioning in a bit but overall it's an enjoyable game. It looks great, the general gameplay loop is fun and there's a lot of customization to be done. It's not groundbreaking in any way but it's simply good enough.
I've only been playing through the campaign so far. The story is quite abysmal so I haven't been paying attention to it past the first hour. I noticed I was just on my phone during all the dialogue so I decided I might as well just save time and skip all the cutscenes and dialogue. This seems to be the general consensus around the community as well. Luckily, the story isn't really the main point of the game. It's just there to provide a setting and a backdrop basically.
I've been blasting through missions with my two characters and I can say that it's fun to see weapons and mods dropping left and right. Your character grows in power basically all the time and that's something I like. It's gonna hit a plateau at some point of course where it becomes more of a grind but that's to be expected.
Warframe from Temu
I'm gonna be honest and say that for these first few hours it has felt a little bit like Warframe from Temu. It's basically a hard copy and that can't be denied. The characters we can play as are called Descendants and they are basically just Warframes. Different characters with different abilities we can play as. Some even have an ultimate version that's even stronger than the base version.
They are also unlocked in basically the same way. You can grind them out through very low drop rates or you can outright buy then from the shop with premium currency. The currently most popular Descendant is called Ultimate Bunny and you can buy it for roughly $50. From what I've read on Reddit it can be farmed out in 30-100 hours depending on your luck. This is something I don't mind doing myself as long as the farm is varied. If it's just playing the exact same mission over and over again them I'm out. I don't know yet if that is the case.
Shortcomings
I've already mentioned one shortcoming in the abysmal story. Since the game in itself is fun I'm perfectly able to look past this. One think that's not so easy to look past is the even more abysmal UI. It's not horrible in itself as it has all the components you'd expect and need but it's just to big. I feel like most of the time almost half my screen is covered in UI in some way and it's totally ruining any kind of immersion.
The quest log tracker is immensely big and takes up almost 20% of your screen on the left side if you have multiple quests tracked. The ability bar at the bottom is also needlessly big. This should just have been put down in the left corner where it's less intrusive. There is an option to turn off the UI completely but that's most likely there just to take screenshots. It would be cool to see more options to customize the UI to create a more immersive experience. I have low hopes for this though seeing as the game is largely made for consoles.
In my first hour of the game I did also look at the ingame shop as a big shortcoming. I changed my mind on this when I delved into is and learned that you're just paying for convenience and faster progress. The game is strictly PvE so you don't get any advantage on other players which is good.
I'm gonna keep on playing this for a little while to see how the game develops once I get into the endgame. The devs are also really good at listening to the community and make changes rather fast so that could spell a great future for the game.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.