The First Descendant as of now has a total of 22 characters to play as; but starts by having you pick one of the three starting “Descendants”. The ice queen Viessa, the stone wall Ajax or the flame boss, Nuke Lepic. Luckily all three of these characters are fairly viable throughout the game including endgame (yes including Ajax). The First Descendant is rich with incredible looking visuals, with equally good-looking character models, male and female alike. The gameplay is incredibly fluid with the grappling hook making movement incredibly fun and easy. I am currently playing the game on a 4070 TI SUPER, and it is a great looking and smooth experience. Something about the game’s visuals just ticks all the boxes for me. The Characters are unique in combat as they are visually. For example, Bunny is a character whose entire kit revolves around her running around the map keeping her momentum up to use her AOE electric attack to absolutely wipe trash mobs on the map. Valby, on the other hand uses water-based attacks to keep the area around her, and the ground around her enemies submerged in water, doing damage-over-time. She can also traverse the map by turning into water and “skating” across the map. Like most looter-shooters, there is a "meta" for some characters, but these are mostly situational. Most characters are built one way for “bossing” (void intercept missions) and differently for dungeons and exploring. Yujin is a character I personally play a lot of. He is a healing-based character that, when built correctly, can AOE heal his teammates every few seconds- completely healing them instantly! But, if he is running solo, he can be a devastating AOE nuke with his “Proliferating Allergy” mod. Characters and weapons have separate mods where you really get to theory craft and make alternative builds to fit whatever scenario you may encounter. Most of the character mods are universal between all characters with simple mods such as increased HP, DEF, and decreased cooldowns. Furthermore, each Descendant has a handful of unique mods that specifically boost one of their skills.
Of course, this is where the grind comes in- and boy, the grind in this game is steep, just like any F2P game. Every character has a percentage chance to drop a part you need to build them that are either locked behind reactor boss fights or intercept boss battles. However, even before you get to that part, you need to farm an item called "amorphous material" to then fight said boss or reactor boss. Some characters have drop rates for parts as low as 6%, and every character takes four pieces to build- the same as exotic weapons. Once you collect these parts, you must build each individual part separately (4 hours each). Once you complete those parts, you can craft the character- with most of the characters taking roughly 18 hours. This also leads to another problem with the game that people may have: microtransactions.
With the harshness of the grind, coupled with the exceptionally long timers per piece THEN per character as well, will make you seriously consider buying a speed up- and personally, I feel the timers on each part plus each character in addition to the grind is quite silly. So, you will be grinding for every single resource: Gold, “Kuiper Shards”, and various other zone-specific materials to build new characters, weapons or upgrade your mods. Or you can buy the characters outright- saving you days’ worth of grinding. Again, this kind of time-gated content is to be expected in a F2P game, even though it is a bit high in my opinion. We also must talk about another issue, which is the “normal” and “ultimate” versions of Descendants. These “ultimate” characters have split the community into those who do not want to even bother grinding and gearing a normal version of a descendant, when an ultimate version could be coming out soon. I personally do not feel as strongly as others, since the raw stats of these characters are negligible at best; but some characters get access to unique skills, such as Lepic. In the initial release, some of these drop rates were downright terrible, and collecting resources to fight reactor bosses was extremely time consuming and felt awful. But since release, the Devs have been very receptive to feedback from the community. Over time, they have revised many overly long timers and changed low drop rates for materials necessary for upgrading characters and weapons, and they have made it more respectful of players’ time. In my opinion, the support by the Nexon Devs of this game has been amazing, considering the reputation Nexon has had in the mobile space. The Devs and very communicative, reaching out and responding to the community with weekly updates and fixes.
I think this game may have a future based on how well the Dev support has been since release. They have committed to adding a “loot protection” system in the future to help with lower drops. They are also adding an NPC who will your excess character materials so you can get something back from all your useless drops. The reactions from players to Season One have been mixed, at best- With a decent chunk of the community (me included) thinking this specific game mode just is not fun to play. The season one game mode is called "invasion", it is a mode that is scored based on how fast you clear trash mobs inside of each room while solving a specific puzzle. It may be color matching, or matching symbols on pylons to unlock a door. Either way, the mode itself just is not fun and it unfortunately the best way to unlock the newest character. However, I am very much looking forward to the extreme versions of dungeons they are adding towards the end of the season and the rest of the road map. Although this game has had a couple of hiccups out the gate, there is a future here if Nexon continues to do the right things for the community. This game takes a lot from other games, and I hope at some point it finds its own identity. Keep the waifus though.
P.S. I absolutely loved the summer skin pack, and I hope the Halloween one is just as good. Swimsuit Viessa is top tier.
Pros:
⦁ Stunning visuals and amazing movement.
⦁ Build diversity is fun for all scenarios.
⦁ Excellent Dev support (so far)
⦁ Unique and fun characters
⦁ Fun coop gameplay (except pre-patch frost walker with randoms)
Cons:
⦁ questionable microtransactions (pay for convenience)
⦁ Start of game is a slog.
⦁ Very grindy and time consuming to unlock characters.
⦁ Story a bit lacking
Final score: 7.5/10 This game has a promising future if Nexon
supports it.