The First Descendant unfortunately offers nothing unique whatsoever aside from abhorrent microtransaction practices and fishy plagiarism from a company that has a similar track record compared to other shady Asian game studios like NetEase that create cobbled-together plagiarized games that have already seen massive success, only to shut these same games down months later after raking in the microtransaction payouts. Nexon has a history of shifting their main focus away from core gameplay and towards loot box systems and item drop rates that allow players to pay for better chances, without releasing what exactly those chances are themselves. Given that they were just recently fined $9 million in legal fees for misleading players of MapleStory in their other loot box system, I'm sure they are hard at work crafting a new way to rake in cash from a whole new First Descendant playerbase.

Every character looks as "anime-cool" as they can with no rhyme or reason, seemingly just to draw further emphasis on cosmetic options that players can buy with real money, further increasing their maximum payout. Apparently--with regard to the game's description on Steam--you are fighting for the survival of humanity. This coupled with the trailer as well as gameplay, showcases a product that comes out to being so incredibly generic. What truly gets under my skin is how much people eat this up. There is nothing epic about the clunky gameplay or uninspired futuristic soldier hullabaloo that we have seen from so many other uninspiring one-off games recently. I cannot emphasize how stiff everything in this game is. The whole project is an AI-generated Pinterest board of anime cyberpunk-soldier art that doesn't ever fit in its environment. How many more times in videogames does the protagonist or character we play as have to sit and stare and some emotionless being that reads through pages and pages of dialogue as blanket and shallow statements that we seemingly have to get attached to. Exposition should be shown to us, for us to uncover, rather than looking at generic burn mark scar-on-face friendly commander guy speak for 5 minutes in a monotone voice about the most randomly-named weapon or enemy ever and expecting us to care about it.

This game is once again so clunky and lacks any flow whatsoever, its way too uninspired with no new ideas. This game is obsessed with menus with an wholly terrible user interface, combined with a dead world with quest objectives written by an 8 year old child with the memory of a goldfish. This game is only appealing to those who like senselessly grinding and grinding away to be the best and look the best (except you can also be the best by spending exorbitant amounts of money).

The only reason this game is pulling the numbers it has is because there is nothing else to play right now. What a poor mobile game on PC this is, unfortunately.

*I feel like I need to add that I do not hate microtransactions, this is a free-to-play game after all and the developers need to make money somehow. There are other, better ways to go about this though. Nexon clearly developed the store before their game, and their priorities are in the wrong place. Furthermore, this works to hate the player and find the best way to take their money fast before the game gets shut down.