The First Descendant review: The Bones of Warframe, the Skin of Destiny, and the Ghost of Korean Live-service games

Warframe and Destiny had a baby, and it turned out okay. This is how most looter-shooter enthusiasts would describe The First Descendant, Nexon’s attempt at capturing a relatively untapped MMO-lite niche. For the last decade or so, this niche has been under the shadow of Warframe and Destiny — twin colossal ancestors that invented and fine-tuned the blueprint of live-service shooters revolving around the joy of resource-hoarding and spinning the roulette on RNG loot drops.

The First Descendant takes this blueprint and traces its outlines. As someone with 3000 hours in Warframe, I obviously had to investigate this, loupe in hand, free-to-play tag in pocket. Naturally, the bias of knowing and loving Warframe so much will color my impression of Nexon’s copied homework, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The First Descendant is a hotchpotch of borrowed mechanics and looter-shooter cliches

I've put 150 hours in The First Descendant, and about 20 of those are from the open beta back in 2023. For most live-service titles, this wouldn't have been enough. Yet, getting to the end game on this one, I feel like I’ve got the memo.

The first few hours are the most confounding but also the best (Image via Nexon)

There are some technical issues, ranging from optimization to jank, but they will eventually get ironed out by the good graces of Nexon. Instead, I’ll spend the review talking about stuff that might not get fixed that easily.

The triple-A Caliber MTX demon (and the hell to pay)

Let us address the Elephant in the room first: yes, the microtransactions are as extortionate as they get. The First Descendant is a textbook example of a live-service Korean game. Don’t peel off the free-to-play label, there’s a big price tag underneath. Just to apply a new color to your rusty old suit, you have to buy

A Paint pack, where the paint is spent after using it once—just like real-life paint.
A paid body armor cosmetic to put the paint on. We don’t do body painting here.

Technically, you can get both of these from the Battle Pass (and the Supply Shop) after a few months of Seasonal Grind. But don’t expect sartorial excellence from your free cosmetic. To truly stand out in the hub-city fashion walk, you have to shell out money—the first lesson of the monetization textbook.

Now, if you just want to enjoy all the content, you don’t need to buy Caliber at 20 times the price of Warframe’s premium currency. You can get to the end-game content just fine without dropping a dime. I'm happy to announce I got there, and I’m getting mechanic-checked hard by the hard-mode Collosi. But I can’t get past that with just real money, and that’s already a big leg up from the Lost Ark scenario I expected.

This is the state of The First Descendant at release, though. If Nexon decides to gradually dial up the pay-to-progress conveniences, it might eventually meet the pay-to-win demise that has befallen many Korean live-service games.

Now that the bread-eater game is out of the way, let's talk about the rice-eater game.

Story and Presentation: I wear my Iron Heart on my sleeves, and people (military-industrial complexes) take advantage

The First Descendant springboards the most banal premise you can expect in a looter-shooter. You’ve seen them once, you’ve seen them all. Humanity is under the threat of extinction, and there are *bad people* who would profit from that arrangement. In this case, the big bad is a war-like alien tribe called Vulgus, and their various factions are cut from the same "alien horde want to kill you" cloth.

The Animus-mockup exists with little explanation (Image via Nexon)

The central conflict in the story is artifacts of supreme power called Iron Hearts. It’s a race to collect all these Dragon Balls, and your adversaries have a head start. Don’t worry, though, you have an entire military organization and an AI-powered guardian figure backing you.

It’s hard to write a compelling and original plot about looting and shooting, but the world-building feels like a big missed opportunity in The First Descendant. The bosses and operatives back at the base are trite military types with MGSV mores, but the playable Descendants, who are central parts of the story, are sometimes a little more interesting.

You can get little nuggets of backstory from listening to stray remnants of memory bottled up in an Arche Echo, or some Journal Records here and there. The fire-mage Descendant is a cook, the HQ has a tavern you cannot visit for some reason. But these minuscule threads of personality are easy to miss on an otherwise dull fabric. It’s dull enough that many players will eventually start skipping past cumbersome lines of Arche this and techno-babble that.

The First Descendant has a hackneyed narrative straight out of some corny shounen stint with a token number of twists and turns peppered in between. There are some entertaining beats, but nothing that sticks with you. The English dub perhaps cheapens the experience even further, with some very inconsistent performance on some characters, and top-notch delivery on others.

What with bosses as silly as "Greg the Star-Crossed," it might get hard to suspend your disbelief. To make the best of it, don’t give it the courtesy of critical scrutiny. Enjoy it for what it is: a cheesy backdrop for fighting alien hordes and chewing gums.

Audio-Visuals: Best-sounding guns this side of the west

The sheen of Unreal Engine 5 buttresses the experience in all the ways you would predict. Roaming the wide-open content islands, I was reminded a lot of Dragon Age: Inquisition. That game had its problems, but the Frostbite environments were a joy to look at in 2014; a feeling The First Descendants re-invokes in 2024.

The game plies the usual open-world fantasy setpieces (Image via Nexon)

While the varied environments were charming, the logic and identity of The First Descendant's art direction is more of an open-ended question. There is little rhyme or reason for the geographical placement of areas. The topographies all manage to be distinct, but any larger sense of world cohesion is sacrificed on the altar of backdrop variety.

Colossi (kaiju bosses that you fight in a void space) look quite iconic, but at other times, the game feels like it lacks a distinct sense of identity. Vulgus architecture is eerily similar to Illithid ships from Baldur's Gate 3. Albion, the hub city, is quirky with little explanation: suspended atop a dam fenced in by a gorge, operated by a giant power core crested into the mountain.

Its residents are ye olde military personnel and researchers plucked from their little labs. Your friends bear some degree of individuality even through the homogeneity of supermodel aplomb, but the same cannot be said of your foes. Some monsters seem typical fantasy grunts, others seem highly inspired by Destiny baddies. Nothing unique enough to leave a mark.

Audio design, on the other hand, is a category where I can sing praises without reservation. The First Descendant gives you some of the best gunplay audio I've heard in my decade-long career of playing looter-shooters, and it carries the experience hard. The splat of headshots and the feedback of bullet hits feel viscerally tactile, and the ka-ching of rare loot drops hits my neurochemical circuitry just right.

Gameplay and Structure: Thank you Descendant, but the princess is in another castle

If the unobtainium plot wasn't bad enough, The First Descendant's quest structure makes you rubberband so much it becomes predictable. Every new biome (area) is partitioned into a couple of battlefields, and each will have some overarching "operation" you work toward. These are all "battlefield missions" you start at your own pace. Once you complete these, the "Operation" at the end is a separately instanced dungeon.

This sounds great on paper, with clear impressions of Destiny 2. In practice, this creates open-ended vapid theme parks. The open battlefields are four-player lobbies, so you'll run into missions where others are hard at work. But this novelty wears off fast because nothing in these zones of control elevates co-op play. By the point you clear Sterile Lands (the game's second area), you are already Pavloved into darting from one glowing objective point to another.

If they nerf this Kuiper Shard farm, I'll rebel (Image via Nexon)

The open areas feel like they were meant to serve a greater purpose - a purpose which was lost in translation. It's an expensive film set with purely decorative props, except for the occasional Encrypted Vault hunt. The content drought cuts a linear path through this film set by implication. At best, you can follow that trail and think there’s a great wide world out there.

The overarching structure might be a repetitive return-to-sender business, but The First Descendant's core gameplay is surprisingly satisfying. The gunplay feels good, the difficulty curve is well-balanced and keeps you invested in its many systems. A spammable dodge gets the job done, and you can use a grappling hook for short-term mobility and platforming segments.

The melee (sub-attack) system has a cool interaction with the grapple hook, but meleeing otherwise has no substance or work put into it. All it's useful for is as a pocket knockdown on shielded grunts with a ten-second cooldown.

The titular Descendants are characters with unique skill-sets. You can gradually farm them along the way as you increase your repertoire. All of them are well-designed, but the balancing scale is hard to straighten. A mere two hours in, The First Descendant inexplicably hands the most overpowered mobbing specialist to you on a silver platter. Bunny, the poster-child speedster, is hands-down the best Descendant for any activity other than bossing.

Other Descendants offer unique loot-enhancing interactions: Sharen the spy can sneak into Vulgus Outposts unnoticed, and Enzo can make the game’s token hacking minigame more worthwhile. Yet, for the most part, the fact that you can just press the two-three Bunny combo to hotfoot it through the game disincentivizes the grind of getting some of these characters.

Due to the foundations of a satisfying combat system, the instanced and linear areas of The First Descendant felt the best to me. Easily, the highlight is the Colossus bosses, otherwise called Void Intercept Battles.

The Colossi are the most interesting part of The First Descendant (Image via Nexon)

The removable weak-point shenanigans are ultimately quite simple. It boils down to opening up your detective mode (Ecive) to re-learn that you can shoot their shoulders, kneecaps, and the center of their torso. However, the unique mechanics and huge difficulty ramp with each boss keep you on your toes and, in turn, make these climactic kaiju showdowns the best part of The First Descendant.

It is a travesty, then, that the non-Collosus bosses are so poorly designed. All of them are juiced-up supersoldier versions of Vulgus grunts. They are garden-variety health sponges who give you some orbs to ponder - literally.

Every other story boss, Outpost commander, or dungeon boss comes with the same health-gating mechanic where you have to shoot down multiple floating metallic orbs to open them up to damage again.

As a one-off boss mechanic, this is annoying but manageable. As a factory-default setting on every boss, this becomes downright obnoxious. If I were Nexon, this is the biggest sore spot in The First Descendant I'd try to remedy first.

Meta-progression and Mechanics: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

While it looks and plays like a bricolage of elements from Destiny and The Division, what's under the hood is lifted directly from Warframe. The vertical progression in The First Descendant fans out into a few elements that allow for concurrent upgrades every minute.

The loot you pick up on the battlefield will either be an upgrade to what you’re rocking or get dismantled as junk. This gives you broken-down resources that go into a conveyor belt of upgrading the loot in other ways. There are primarily two fronts you can improve in this game:

Getting better gear on your slots (weapons, Reactor, External Components)
Pumping a better combination of Modules to increase various stats on your Descendant (character) and weapons

Switching gear is the usual Borderlands deal: use higher-level guns for better DPS, and the old stuff is very outdated 10 levels later. Upgrading weapons also ties into a very roundabout self-sustaining loop: break down old weapons into microplastics, craft a nano-cookie with the microplastics, and then feed the cookie to your low-level weapons to upgrade it.

Getting more stuff is very hands-on (Image via Nexon)

There are also "weapon proficiency levels" distinct from weapon levels, which increases another meta-xp bar called Mastery. The place to upgrade Mastery in The First Descendant is called "Prime Hands." Nexon doesn't shy away from admitting it copied Warframe’s homework.

The most obvious impression of Warframe is the modules system. If you haven't played Warframe, you'll have to sit down and do your own homework for a few hours to digest it: Weapons and Descendants can be decked out with Modules, you can increase a limited amount of Module capacity through Mastery Ranks as well as a consumable item that’s hard to farm; Modules come with socket types, and if you match the socket type, the mod capacity drain is cut in half, et cetera.

I hope I won't regret this (Image via Nexon)

The First Descendant makes some scant attempts at familiarizing you with these various systems, but not to an adequate degree. Even with an honorary PhD on looter-shooter structures, I kept finding new stuff 50 hours in. Did you know the game has a dedicated weapon stat screen complete with lore tidbits you can access by pressing F1 when hovering one of its hundred-odd weapons? The game certainly doesn’t tell you that directly. It’s tucked away in a small drawer in the labyrinthine UI, and there's no obvious tutorial pop-ups to tell you that.

'Intimidate Vulgus captives' - What did Nexon mean by this?

The gist is that it’s quite complex for a player new to the looter-shooter genre. Yet, if you do get down to it, it’s fun building up your weapon piece by piece and seeing the numbers go up with each Module rank.

In fact, this death drive toward min-maxing is the entire point of the game. Void Intercept Battles come with a 10-minute timer because they're also meant to be the de-facto DPS checks of The First Descendant. What did you expect, a fair and balanced showdown? Go get higher level Rifling Enhancement and farm up Action and Reaction on your bullet hose, no lollygagging is allowed here.

If you find this parallel-parking, resource-farming, spreadsheet-filing grind ponderous, you'll hate The First Descendant. Like with all looter-shooters, the grind itself is the game.

The First Descendant photo-copies the economical flowchart of the grind from established titles, and sometimes, it feels like a forceful amalgam. The result is still borderline serviceable, and it might even become good someday with tuning.

The Verdict

Nexon's attempt at a looter-shooter duct-tapes borrowed elements from numerous other games and innovates very little. To be sure, signs of good game design can be traced: the weapons are very well-balanced and they all shine in specific niches. The Descendants are fun to play, and the superb audio design binds the experience together for a good time. For the first hundred hours, that is. The end-game of The First Descendant is stale at release, and it lost my interest fast.

This is because the end game also pushes me toward the more unsavory side of the live-service experience. To get new stuff in this not-gacha title, you often have to confront its perennial gambling subsystems. Amorphous Materials are the resident lootboxes of The First Descendant. In these, you can find Descendant and Ultimate weapons parts with weighted chances. To increase the chances of rarer loot, you have to farm up consumable lotto tokens (Shape Stabilizers), which is its own grind.

These waters are almost as deep as The First Descnedant's mechanical depth (Image via Nexon)

The First Descendant exposes the calluses of F2P-peons such as myself more often than other looter shooters. You could try to farm a full set of Ultimate Bunny through 20-plus hours of real-time grinding or just buy it off for the price of a AAA title. This is how a free-to-play looter shooter is supposed to monetize itself, and it’s a mutually understood game design direction between Korean developers and players.

This design intent is unlikely to change, as this collectathon is an inevitable side of The First Descendant's endgame. The other side of the coin, the designated end-game activities, is just more of the same with bigger damage numbers. This is where I took my exit, as the minty-fresh smell of a new game had died out by then.

Many live-service titles start out weak and build up their sinew through slow but steady content roadmaps. I've unboarded and jumped back on the Warframe bus countless times - The First Descendant may similarly grapple-hook me back in the future if Nexon nurtures it the right way.

For now, I'm looking at the game in its current state, and I find it mediocre to the extent of being forgettable. It’s hard to stand shoulder to shoulder with Warframe and Destiny, their decade-long legacy, and their entrenched communities. The First Descendant takes their old formula and resells it in a new ampule, but that’s all it is: a fresh ampule, wrapped up in a fanservice flyer.