The First Descendant review – a familiar destiny (2024)

Destiny 2 and Overwatch provide the inspiration for yet another free-to-play live service game that wants to take over your life, but should you let it?

In theory, new IP (Intellectual property) is exactly what the video games industry needs. When almost every new game, particularly bigger budget titles, is a sequel or licensed product, new blood is vital. And yet with each new generation, as development costs soar, the risks associated with creating something new becomes ever greater. But just as a sequel doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of new ideas, new IP doesn’t guarantee anything original.

The First Descendent is one of the most unoriginal games we’ve played in a very long time. As a third person action role-player, that’s also a co-op shooter and a free-to-play live service game, the premise is as cynically unimaginative as it’s possible to be.

Destiny is the primary influence, right down to copying many of the same icons, but what’s more distasteful is how little space has been left for any unique ideas of its own. Instead, this feels like Destiny and every other remotely similar game – from Overwatch to Halo – has been stuffed into a proverbial blender; the resultant grey goop isn’t entirely inedible, but it is entirely without flavour.

To start off with a positive, the graphics and art design in The First Descendant are often quite good. As a sci-fi game the planetary settings are interestingly alien at times and while the overall art style isn’t very cohesive (because a lot of it is still copying Destiny and others) it’s at least notable. Which is more than you can say for the storytelling, which is so completely unengaging it might as well not exist.

We suspect many of the visuals we don’t recognise are probably copied from an anime, or some other source we’re not aware of, but since we can’t identify them, we’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt. Not that it deserves it though, given how much it copies from Overwatch in terms of character abilities and personalities. Although its icky sexualisation of female characters leans more in the direction of fellow Korean-made game Stellar Blade.

Structurally though, it’s Destiny 2 which dominates this patchwork of other people’s ideas, with a very similar mix of ad hoc open world missions and more linear dungeons, capped off with a boss fight. The gunplay may not be as good as Bungie but it’s still good and, as obvious as the game’s many appropriations may be, they are at least pulled off competently. Which means that it is perfectly possible to have fun with the game.

The only thing close to an original idea – in that it’s a generic video game concept and not something it stole from Destiny – is that every character class has a grappling hook, which helps ensure combat is more mobile than average, while obscuring the fact that everything else about the action is so familiar. Although it’s disappointing you don’t have to put it to more imaginative use in boss battles.

The First Descendant review summary

In Short: A depressingly generic free-to-play looter shooter that steals shamelessly from other, better, games but never has the nerve to try and create anything of its own.

Pros: Most of the game, especially the combat, is perfectly competent, as it should be given how closely it copies from its various inspirations. Good graphics and occasionally interesting art design.

Cons: Painfully unimaginative on every level, with no sign that the developer is even trying to put its own stamp on anything. Poor performance at launch and terrible storytelling.

Score: 5/10