Descent

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.

386/40 or better (486/66 recommended)
8 MB RAM
Sound Card
Mouse