Descent

Awesome classic fusion of flying and first person shooting inside expansive mazes of twisting tunnels. After 30 years it’s still one of my favorite FPS games of all time. But there’s just no way I can recommend this offering which is the original game running through DOSBOX. It hasn’t been updated in any way and ran horribly on my PC, and the price they’re asking is ridiculous. Get it if you need the game data files to run a more modern source port such as DXX-Rebirth, but I would wait for a sale.

Bought this expecting a proper modern port of the classic Descent, but it's just a bare-bones 62 MB DOSBox wrapper with zero updates. Framerate feels capped/low (around 15-30 FPS depending on setup), no native modern controller support (old joysticks only work poorly), and no widescreen/high-res fixes out of the box. I got the full series on GOG for under $10 years ago with better extras and the same ability to drop the data files into source port. This feels like minimal effort for the price. Disappointing re-release of a 30-year-old game. The owners should be ASHAMED.

This game is a CLASSIC shooter, and puts Doom to shame.

$45 for a 30 year old game is crazy. Bought it on a sale, but you're never notified that they go on sale. I love Decent, it was my intro to flight based games, as well as the "doom shooter" genre. I love it, and I wish more people could experience it.

Old games were harder. Plain and simple. & this was one of the first PC games I ever played and the first I recall playing online, repeatedly getting whooped on my choppy 33.6k modem against my best friend on his 56k modem. It was a sad state of affairs, but an unforgettable time. Difficulty scaling is brutal. Anything above Rookie difficulty is extremely difficult. It's hard enough just finding your way through the maze, then the addition of the perfect/instantaneous hitscan of opposition forces makes higher difficulty levels almost impossible, the ubiquitous Class 1 Drillers & the red Super Mechs with their homing missiles being the most notorious. Drillers instantly damaging with their Vulcan cannons the moment you open a door or peek a corner. The difficulty spike when these baddies are introduced is insane. They're a bit unfair and these two enemies alone almost ruin the game. Add to that that shields become almost impossible to find makes higher levels unfun. (Apparently "Rookie is actually the 'normal' difficultly mode.) These gameplay elements are frustrating, so I suggest playing Trainee or at most Rookie to have an actual enjoyable playthrough of this classic 3D space masterpiece. Beat it with a final score of 2,247,385 on Trainee and had a blast doing it. Get rekt alien virus mining robots.

This was the third computer game I ever played. the !st I ever bought way back in the days of dial up internet. I've played thousands of hours of Descent over the years. I broke my first joystick playing this game. Taught my boys to play this, one of them told me about this version when it released on steam. Had to get it to see if it wasas fun as I remembered. It has been worth it again.

(My playtime is deceptive; I actually played this using a source port Steam doesn't know about. Purchase includes the DOS original played using a DOS emulator, but I highly recommend using a source port.) Descent is an interesting specimen, particularly for its place in history. Doom released in December of '93, and Quake released in June of '96. Almost exactly on the midpoint between those dates, in March of '95, was Descent. Doom was more or less the first game that really [i]felt[/i] 3D, though in many ways that was just an illusion; a lot of it behaves as if it's just 2D. So once it came out and people realized that, the race was on to make a shooter that was well and truly 3D in every way. Quake usually gets credit for being the first of that description. But Descent comes very close. The only 2D part of the game are the sprites used for pickups and some projectiles. Everything else truly is 3D. And with that whole extra dimension, it'd be a shame to let gravity restrict it, wouldn't it? That, I presume, is the reason why Descent lets you fly a ship through levels that basically don't have gravity. You can move through all three dimensions with equal freedom. To my knowledge, Descent was [i]the[/i] pioneer of this subgenre, called 6DOF. As a pioneer, it's definitely a bit rough around the edges. The weapon selection is kinda iffy, enemies are a bit [i]too[/i] smart, and the Class 1 Drillers should never have seen the light of day. (They have a jumpscaring aggro scream, a rapid-fire hitscan weapon, near perfect accuracy, and react way too fast.) Still, despite not having aged all that well, I think it's worth looking into, especially considering the landscape of shooters at the time of its release.

A game about a glorious robot worker's uprising told from the perspective of the villain, a strikebreaking "Material Defender" sent by capitalists to end the robot worker utopia. Sounds right to me. This game can be confusing, disorienting and wildly spike in difficulty, but my goodness it was fun in the 90's and it's a blast still. It was worth pulling my joystick out of its storage box for this but it plays decently well on keyboard and mouse or keyboard-only, although the controls take some getting used to (kind of a mix of 90's FPS like DOOM and a flight simulator). As was the style at the time, levels all follow the same pattern: find blue key, open blue door, find yellow key, open yellow door, find red key, open red door, blow up reactor/boss, escape quickly. Always know where your exit is before blowing up that reactor! Having established that the game is an awesome 90's classic, the Steam release is... an overpriced DOSBox-emulated version. I mean, it plays the game as it was pretty much at release, which is fine by me, but $10 for a game that old with no QoL improvements is steep. There are better fan-made remasters that are better ideas, but if you just want to play it as-is and absolutely want it in your Steam library, then go ahead and buy! I wasn't disappointed. But if you want more, guides on Steam and elsewhere will get you many, many more levels beyond the 30 (27 + 3 secret levels) single-player levels in the base campaign and a better multiplayer experience.

Game Status Released: 1994 (Shareware). 1995 (Registered) Developed: Parallax Software Published: Interplay Genre: 1-8 Player Flight Based FPS Taglines: "They'd replace us all with robots given half the chance." I played the Shareware Version of this game and it was pretty fun as its was nothing compared to the 27 Mining Colonies that you'll go through as you shoot your way through an army of Infected Mining Robots and to the Main Reactor of each Mining Colony that's operated by the PTMC. Once you destroy the Reactor Core, head for the Emergency Exit before the Mining Colony blows up taking the Pyro GX with it. Overall, Descent is quite a pretty good Flight Based Shooter where you have total and complete Freedom where you move about in the mining colonies and its high action gameplay is pretty nice as its a challenging game as you get into the later mining colonies. Last but not least, you can also play Descent with one of the Source Ports such as D1X Rebirth or D1X Redux. There are 4 Different Versions of Descent 1 that I am aware of being Descent Registered, Descent Shareware (7 Level), Descent Test Flight (3 Level) & Descent: Destination Saturn (15 Level). Best of Luck, Material Defender

This game is so nostalgic but also is still just a good game till this day.