Which Way is Up?
A Review of Descent
by Michael Allen
At first glance, Descent looks like another re-heated Doom
clone, cooked over in the microwave of game imitation. The impression
lasts about five seconds, before you make the realization that can
have startling and sometimes unpleasant implications for your lunch:
"Hey, there's no FLOOR!"
Well, actually there is a floor, but you aren't necessarily
bound to it as your erstwhile Doomarine is. Those crazy folks over at
Parallax Software have decided that life is just much more fun if
gravity is left out of it. This lack of one of the fundamental forces
of nature has it's advantages: falling over while tying your shoelaces
no longer has any painful side-effects. But, it also allows the map
designers to do things to mess with your head like putting doors in
the ceiling. Or is that a wall?
The cover story for this strangely-addicting "if-it-moves-shoot-it" festival is one of the tried-and-true science fiction plots: the ordinarily friendly mining robots are revolting
(yeah, they stink on ice...) against the Post Terran Mineral
Corporation, and your job is to mop them up. Of course, there are
about a thousand of them and only one of you. What is it with these
future mega-corporations that they cannot afford more than one
troubleshooter? However, the ship that the corporation provides you is par
excellence. It has the ability to cloak and become invulnerable... of
course, you have to pick up powerups to do those functions. They
couldn't just include those in their general design, nooooooo. That
would be too easy. So, you must satisfy yourself with blowing up
robots using a variety of energy weapons and missiles, ten in all.
As far as controlling your ship goes, Descent proves far more interesting and slightly more complicated than your average Doom clone. The initial learning curve is quite steep due to the 360 degree-3D environment touted proudly many places outside the box. Determining a configuration of keyboard and joystick which allows easy, smooth maneuvering can take a good hour or two. I highly recommend the use of a joystick for this one; trying to just use the keyboard to control forward momentum as well as the orientation of your ship proved too confusing for my fingers. After beginning struggles, though, the joystick-keyboard combination becomes quite natural.
The actual gameplay is very straightforward: robots are bad,
shoot them. The big reactor at the end of most waves is very bad,
kill it. The hostages are innocent victims of an anti-capitalistic
monopoly, rescue them. But, don't die after you pick them up or you
take them with you. The intelligence of your robotic enemies is
actually very impressive. Robots will take potshots at hovering
players, then duck back around a corner to await further
opportunities. If you come flying at them guns blazing, the smarter
ones will simply slide up beyond the line of your fire and continue
raking you with theirs. The levels are well-designed and complicated
without becoming impossibly confusing, and utilize the same three
color keys of Doom. The automap feature is something that every
serious Descent player should become intimately familiar with.
As the next step along the Wolfenstein-Doom evolutionary ladder,
Descent makes a great impression and a pleasing distraction. However,
Descent has the same fundamental problem as Doom in terms of
long-lasting playability: the only way to keep the game interesting is
to up the sheer number of robots you have to kill. In the end, after
thirty levels, I was ready to ascend from Descent.
Gamer's Zone Scorecard
| Product: |
Descent |
| Company: |
Interplay Software
|
| Cost: |
$39.99 |
System Requirements:
386/40 or better (486/66 recommended)
8 MB RAM
Sound Card
Mouse
Breakdown:
Fun Factor 3
Graphics 4
Sound 4
Interface 5
Replayability 3
Overall Score:
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