Descent (1994 Video Game) User Reviews

excellent game!!!

[malvarado · 10/10 · 26 June 2001]

I have played this game for the first time when I was in 7th grade ( 4 school years ago in junior-high ) on a PC. Then, on Tuesday, June 26th, 2001, I didn't know Interplay put " Descent " on Sony Playstation. I have the Macintosh CD-ROM, which has 13 playable CD-audio tracks that can be played on another computer or on an external CD player. This game has stunning 3-D graphics, just as I remembered when I was between the ages of 12 & 13. This game is no longer created by Interplay, but it is followed by its sucessors. The Playstation version of it can be bought ( used ) at Amazon.com ( under " Video Games ).

Even today, it's one of the best games in gaming history.

[Spartan_234 · 10/10 · 19 January 2006]

Descent is a first-person shooter that plays kind of like a simplified flight simulator, and it's simply a blast to play. You are an employee at the Post-Terran Minerals Corporation (PTMC), a leader in the mining industry that uses robots to dig up minerals on all 9 planets. Unfortunately, the robots are being controlled by some kind of hacker (presumably an evil alien race) bent on using the robots to destroy the planet Earth. PTMC's CEO calls you in for a mission briefing, and you simply do not want to do this job. What job? You're piloting a heavily modified Pyro-GX to destroy the mining robots.

While your ship can only take a shot or two before blowing up, it has shields that allow it to take a lot of damage. Picking up a shield boost will increase your shields by 15%, very similar to med-kits in traditional first-person shooters. You'll start the game with 100% shields, and the maximum is 200% (even the shield boosts will get your shields over 100%!) Considering that the AI in this game is very smart -- as you progress in the game, the robots will observe your playing strategies and start using them themselves -- these shields prove to be very helpful. You have awesome weapons at your disposal, all that use an energy supply (except for the Vulcan Cannon, an extremely accurate weapon that spits out shotgun shells, which uses its own shotgun shells) that starts at 100% and, like your shields, can go up to 200%. Energy boosts increase your energy by 15% up to 200%, just like the shield boosts. You start out with a laser gun and some concussion missiles, and progress to better weapons like a speadfire cannon, homing missiles, and proximity bombs. The rest I'll leave to you to find out.

Unlike traditional flight simulation games, the controls in Descent are relatively simple. You can manually accelerate and reverse your ship, or turn "cruise control" on. As in traditional first-person shooters, you can also slide left and right. Your ship is so well-built as to even slide "up" and "down"! You can also roll to the left and right. And, of course, you can rotate your ship in all directions (what would the game be without being able to rotate?) Using the mouse and the usual WASD control scheme works fine.

Even today, Descent's graphics are amazing. As in Quake, Descent uses true-3D to draw its graphics. With the use of special command line parameters, you can even increase the resolution up to 640x480, but you need a VESA-compatible video card to do that. Most computers manufactured in Descent's day (1995), even the fastest ones, couldn't handle the 640x480 mode, but if you have the horsepower (most computers in the late 90's do) then it's well worth it. The music is also very well done, especially the tune in the sound setup program, which I now have stuck in my head.

I couldn't find anything wrong with the game, at least if you have a computer that's capable of running it. Descent is a DOS-based game, and in Windows XP, the game acts like it's on speed and the sound effects don't work very well. Then again, Descent was never designed to run on that type of computer.

The action is non-stop, the explosions are constant, the graphics are state-of-the-art, the music is catchy, and the controls are slick. What more could you want? A definite 10 / 10 to this one!

94% -- how to take Doom to 3D space

[FreeMediaKids · 9/10 · 23 June 2018]

PROS

• Imagine Doom and the joys thereof, but with robots, six degrees and three axes of freedom, mostly 3D animated models instead of just sprites, even more detailed level structures, rescuing hostages as a secondary objective, the plot being that mining robots have been illegally reprogrammed for all the wrong purposes and that the player must destroy all the mines, and the only primary objective being to destroy a mine's reactor and escaping before the mine self-destructs. That is Descent, and it is an excellent comparison.
• There is something unique about this game, something unprecedented. Flight combat games have been a classic before year 2000, and first-person shooters, which historically involved some degree of labyrinths, were already gaining popularity in the 1990s. Parallax Software thought, "What if we took elements of a flight combat game, and combined them with elements of a first-person shooter like Doom?", and out came such a game. Parallax risked their budget developing a flight game that also felt like playing a first-person shooter, with some expectations that there might never be sequels (which would go on to also be critically acclaimed) if this one commercially failed, and the result was overwhelmingly positive. It is one of the earliest games, and perhaps the first, to be a first-person shooter with six degrees of freedom (6DOF), and it certainly is the icon of that subgenre of FPS games.
• Technically, mechanically, and gameplay-wise, even by today's standards, it is still fun. It was a drastic step to make almost everything a part of the truly 3D environment. The campaign formula as we know it is run-and-gun, but who does not like firing laser cannons and machine guns and launching missiles and deploying bombs and mines as countermeasures at something that can be destroyed, be it computer monitors or robots, along with additions such as the arcade-y scores and game-changing powerups? It is also unpredictable, where the player is not certain what may lie in the unexplored, whether an enemy would launch a surprise-attack as he or she progresses, and most importantly, what type of robot it is. As if that does not produce enough adrenaline, the background music keeps the player motivated and confident, as well as occasionally wrought with fear or tension, which all fits well with the speedy pace of this robot-blasting game.
• The addition of an automap is greatly needed, and it is useful for finding one's way through large mazes. The absence of it would have made the game frustrating and tedious, as the player would travel room-to-room, trying to figure out where to go.
• Very importantly, Parallax knew from the start that a PC FPS-styled game is only a half of a game without multiplayer. The multiplayer has all 30 levels from single-player mode plus an additional 5 with four game modes: Anarchy (basically Deathmatch), Team Anarchy, Robo-Anarchy (Deathmatch with a twist of robots as obstacles), and Cooperative, which--yes, you are right.--is single-player campaign with multiple players. On the note of multiplayer, Parallax had long terminated its servers, but what is amazing is that the player can configure DOSBox (the emulator for Descent) to host an IPX as a TCP/IP under a defined IP address, and those also connected to the internet can find the player's IP address and play online. Ultimately, multiplayer still works!
• Another important thing is that this game is designed from the start to render homebrew levels (both single-player and multiplayer) easy, meaning that if playing the many but same levels over and over is repetitive, new levels could be made, and the fun is still retained. A new custom campaign could even be made.

CONS

• Unfortunately, the wireframe automap is not perfect. With numerous lines obstructing the view of the paths, navigating may become confusing, especially if the level structure is more complex, and controls for that can be confusing, all depending on the angle of the player ship. Changing the viewing distance, which limits how many lines are displayed, does help, but not always.
• Multiplayer could have had more than just 4 modes, three of which being a unique style of deathmatch, and a total of 35 levels, and that would have eliminated some degree of repetition. It should be noted, however, that multiplayer is only the second most important aspect of the game, since the focus is single-player. Still...

CONCLUSION: Descent is an adrenaline-inducing space combat simulator that takes first-person shooters to space in a conflict against robots.

THE Original 3D Full Imersion Shooter

[mazzterpiece · 9 October 2005]

This game followed after DOOM in the beginning of the era of 3D action shooters. Descent, however, was the first ever game to incorporate the third dimension in it's entirety. You can move up/down, left/right, forward/backward. You can turn right/left, bank up/down, and pitch or roll side to side. You fly a ship that has absolutely no spatial constraints. For over ten years I have been playing this game and it still ranks high on my list. Problem is, you have to have a Windows98 (or earlier) machine to play it. At the time I wrote this review WindowsXP was the current technology and unfortunately, they have killed DOS which is the environment that this game runs in. I have heard of some people successfully configuring later operating systems to run dos games but it is very difficult. That is a shame because this is one of the games that transformed the video game industry into what it is today and you can't even play it any more unless you are running a Legacy machine. I recommend that every video game fan play Descent at some point. It is to the PC video game realm what the original Nintendo 8-Bit system was to the console industry.