The First Descendant feels too generic to succeed
High production values and competence can’t elevate bland ideas.
^Stay tuned after the ads for plenty of QHD footage and our thoughts after playtesting the beta.
Entering the same crowded marketplace that includes behemoths like Destiny and Warframe, and the corpses of high-profile failures like Anthem, must be a daunting prospect. But Korean developers Nexon have gone and done it anyway, and the result is The First Descendant, an extremely “one of those sorts of games” effort that seems to blend elements from every single one of its genre contemporaries into a sort of gloop.
And, look, gloop isn’t necessarily a bad thing, right? Everyone likes gloop. Custard. Rice pudding. Angel delight. Dessert metaphors aside, the thing about The First Descendant is that it feels almost aggressively mid: intent, almost, on existing as a mathematical average of all these other games instead of actively trying to carve out a niche of its own.
Hey, it might just work. People like what they like, and if this gives them more of it in a new environment without all the community cliques and endless expansion baggage that makes the other games extremely daunting for newcomers, then that in itself could be the niche. If nothing else, the production values are solid, making good use of Unreal Engine 5 to blast your optic nerves with more pixel-shaded polygons than they can count.