Character design in The First Descendant verges on genius.
Water-maiden Valby can melt into puddles and pop out meters away, as well as slosh straight through enemies like a watery ghost. Ice queen Viessa frosts her legs to run frictionless while freezing enemies solid. There’s even a former chef who stumbled upon the powers of pyromancy after rushing into a raging fire to save his cooking ingredients.
Nexon’s looter shooter is like someone took Overwatch’s heroes, reimagined them with improbable sci-fi backstories, and whacked them into a gorgeous, Unreal Engine 5.3 Destiny.
In The First Descendant, your mission is to combat The Vulgus, a race of alien invaders from another dimension, bringing with them gigantic creatures even deadlier than they are. As a super-powered Descendant, the fate of Albion and the survival of humanity rests on you.
My playthrough starts in an online hub built into an imposing cliff face. This is where you come to level up, shop, customize, and enter new instances. Looking upwards reveals a battery of colossal gun emplacements, while everywhere you turn, other players are busy running errands in their outlandish future-tech gear. This place is the tip of the spear, a bleeding-edge military settlement designed to fend off unimaginable threats.
With so many icons on the minimap, it takes about 15 minutes to work out how to actually start playing. There are ‘infiltration operations’ and ‘void intercept battles’ and ‘module enhancements’, and weird NPCs standing there saying outlandish things without a trace of levity. You’ll undoubtedly start to make sense of it soon as you settle into your routine, but The First Descendant is difficult to immediately understand.
As a gesture towards accessibility, you are allowed to freely switch between characters at any point and experiment with the incredibly varied roster, which means you’re not locked into a specific playstyle. You can go from healing teammates as former military surgeon Gley, who harvests health orbs from defeated enemies, to double-jumping on people’s heads as a big-eared speedster appropriately called Bunny.
One terminal leads me to a void intercept battle. This is basically an arena fight against one of eight towering bosses, playable solo or in co-op. The first is DeadBride, a gigantic robot lady with sleek white armor and a massive arm cannon. You can rematch them for resources as much as you want, farming essentially being the game’s meta. Enter a mission, acquire materials, return to base, and level up.
The next mission is out in the field. Typically lasting around ten minutes, your objective is usually something like ‘protect the generator’ or ‘take out x number of foes.’ It’s the varied heroes that make otherwise straightforward tasks fun. Here, I get better acquainted with Valby, who not only has her puddle teleportation trick but slings liquid projectiles called ‘bubble bullets’ and blasts past people with a water jet, equal parts Splatoon and Super Mario Sunshine.
With up to four simultaneous human players and dozens of enemies on-screen, the action is impressive as it is occasionally confusing. For instance, during missions, you’re told to look out for void fragments and void fusion reactors and vulgus recon outposts and encrypted vaults. Why? I have no idea.
Browsing the tutorial is like trying to read an instruction manual for a Soviet rocket. “There are six types of sockets for Modules,” it advises. “Requirements decrease when equipping a Module in agreement with its Socket Type.” It’s impossible to take in all of its systems during your first playthrough.
Meanwhile, characters have four different attributes to learn - fire, chill, electric, toxic - three different archetypes - fusion, dimension, singular, tech - and a ridiculous amount of weapon variants. “Reactors are equipment that determine the power of a skill,” says the tutorial. “They vary depending on the skill’s attributes and archetype.” I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Heroes are by far the best part of The First Descendant. Thankfully, you can acquire them all through playing, but you can also buy them instantly from a shop. It’s clear Nexon expects big things from its marketplace seeing as it’s already filled with dozens of alternate skins, spawn effects, and ridiculous emotes. One of them has a hero playing the bongos.
If you know what you’re doing, The First Descendant promises incredible replay value, with a seemingly endless endgame featuring 16 dungeons playable on normal or hard and thousands of ways to build out your character.
An overwhelming abundance of options and mechanics and resources, however, means knowing what you’re doing will take a while.
The First Descendant releases July 2, 2024, on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.
