Descent 3

greatest game of all time

Ben a serious gamer since...ohhh, about 1985 and when I say this game is CRAP, I mean THIS GAME IS CRAP!!! I've had, played and LOVED both Descent & Descent II, and if you think it's gonna be anything like those, you will be SADLY disappointed. I just WASTED my money...THANK GAWD I didn't pay full price or I would be REALLY P'd off!!!! On a sidenote - Steam's game selections has been getting crappier and crappier as of late...thinking seriously about cancelling my Steam account and going with Gamefly or some other reputable provider

Big thanks to Ryan C. Gordon for the new Linux port :-) Seems to be working very nicely so far, I will need to revisit some the old levels here.

Third and last title of Descent series. After release of the second one Parallax Software broke into Outrage Entertainment and Volition Inc. The former made the last chapter of Descent series and the latter created not less interesting Freespace series. Despite quite a big development in contrast to the second title, the third one was not accepted by all fans. The main reason is leaving simple shooter behind and changing it with narrative and complicated locations with alternating vast spaces and narrow corridors, and also kind of cartoon graphics. And though I understand what fans do not like about Descent 3, I don’t understand why they don’t like it. Yes, third title moved away from its origins but is it bad? I don’t think so: levels are now really complex and rich. And though developers tried to diversify maps even in the previous titles, the mines remained mines, but here we have mines and caves, industrial structures and planets’ surfaces, and even night city with a subway. Yeah, graphics became cartoonish because of engine change but game’s seriousness and difficulty didn’t vanish. The same can be said about gameplay. Though every mission now has its own goal, the main aspect of it is still shooter with simple spatial puzzles. So I do not see a point in hating 3rd title and considering it a bad game. Yes, it is not perfect but first two games weren’t either. So, I recommend you to try Descent 3 too. P.S. Use 3DFX to conveniently play the game on modern PC.

While I do have fond memories of this game, it has not aged well. There are issues with the graphics implementation of both OpenGL and Direct3D, with only a Glide wrapper offering good, non-glitchy visuals (on is included in this version). That said, many graphical niceties aren't present if you don't have a Pentium 3 or better also includes AMD CPUs. Many audio APIs that D3 can use have been deprecated and/or removed from later versions of Windows, making the only good audio choice be DirectSound. The game wasn't designed with widescreen displays in mind, meaning that setting it to, say, 1080p is a pain and the graphics will either be squished or parts of the HUD will be cut off. Note that these are present in version 1.4, and it seems that a company wants to update D3 to work better with more recent operating systems, including adding OS X and Linux versions. I'll try updating this review when/if they actually do update it.

If you run Linux, [b]don't buy this game[/b]! On starting, the game displays a message: [code] This is a beta test of Descent 3. There are likely bugs. Please report them at: https://bugzilla.icculus.org/ [/code] The store page said nothing about this being a beta ... hmmmmm There certainly [b][u]is[/u][/b] a [url=https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6543]bug[/url] and it's known (since April 2020) and serious - if you play a level for more than a few minutes, your save games get corrupted and crash the game when re-loaded. On the Steam support page, all three website links return 404 (actually all redirected to the same page at interplay.com) and the support email bounces. I've subscribed to the bug report at bugzilla, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. Seriously, Steam, how can you sell a game in this state?

Unplayable on modern computers. Tried fix after fix after fix. A couple of times was able to actually get it started through to the main menu. Then encountered further issues: mouse would not move, froze on menu. Endless (unsuccessful) troubleshooting. Finally gave up.