Recent reviews by TZer0

This is a review considering the game as not on sale. I got it on sale, easy recommendation if you do get it on the sale. Otherwise.. I am more skeptical. I want slightly more polish.

There's a lot to praise in this game, however, I do not think it deserves the current ratings.
Let me go over the good parts first.

• Easy on the eyes - looks good
  
• Sound and music fits
  
• Short, but (mostly) to the point
  
• Tight controls
  
• Surprise minibosses
  
• Fun exploration!

The problems I have are as follows:

• Most important thing: please give dungeons a map that you can find. I am decent at navigating, but when trying to find the last bit of lootable stuff in a dungeon, it would be handy.
  
• I wish that the player's time was respected a little bit more. I like the shortcut design, but I would've liked having teleporters for the different areas.
  
• I wish all respawn points healed you up. Some do. Just make all of them do it. There's no penalty for respawning too, so this choice is odd.
  
• When picking up an upgrade, please always show what it does. I had to open my inventory every time to check what my new pickup does.
  
• This is a bigger one and I don't think this one can be remedied at this point, but (minor spoiler ability) what if we could dodge bullets from the start or much earlier on and the design of the game considered that you had this ability at all times?
  
• Consider where you put the done/not done markers. An exit cave with no other functionality or loot than being an exit cave, but is technically connected to a race that has to be accessed from elsewhere should never be marked.
  
• Enemies sometimes get i-frames for a bit too long. For instance: a boss will have entered its next phase and you can't yet damage it despite it firing at you already.
  
• No option to quickly retry a fight in the arena. Have to die or return to the menu.
  
• The target homing (not auto-aim!) sometimes gets in the way. Very noticeable on the field worm boss.
  
• The slow-mo ability zooms in way too much.

A short surreal game that's worth playing.

If the physics frustrate you, just change it to easy mode.

You get to pet the chicken

Just under 9 hours to 100% for me (I am somewhat experienced in specific with large-scale speed shooters).

This game honestly hit a spot that I've been missing for a while, heck, even contemplating trying to make a game somewhat like this in Godot.

You go fast, you get more and more movement mechanics, there's huge terrain structures and buildings you fight in.

If you miss having played Tribes for a while or liked the movement system in Titanfall, give this a try.

Biggest downside is that it could've been even more creative with some of the moves you can pull and it didn't do that.

No update since December last year. No news items since March.

If this was not an early access title, it would've been fine, but here we are.

Devs: please start doing something. Anything.

I'll start with the good. Visual and audio presentation in basically all aspects is pretty good.
Only minor camera jank on the vehicle when on going up/down hills. I did not experience any issues on my 1080 Ti.

The game starts out strong. The suspense in the beginning is enjoyable. It is a bit railroady, but that can still work for a game like this.

The issue I have with it is that at the end of the day, the game doesn't really pose many interesting questions and misses vital points that they could've referenced when talking about what is going on. The game has a section that to my taste is a bit too slow.

I also wish that the scanner, tracker and binoculars were used more.

Complete plot spoilers for what's going on below.

The force on Regis III that is killing everyone is a metallic self-replicating swarm of "flies". The conversations between the player character and her superior are weird here, at no point are concepts like the primordial soup (which yes, a hypothesis) mentioned, but it would've been extremely relevant. Instead the PC's superior asks if she's abandoning biology when suggesting the metal might exhibit some sort of lifelikeness.

The main question at the end is whether or not you deploy nukes in an attempt to get revenge, and to me, that's not really an interesting question. Even your superior says that blaming this swarm is akin to whipping the sea for drowning sailors. Whether you approach this force like the sea turns the question of what to do at the end - try to nuke or not - into a purely technical question - is it safe, does it achieve anything? Not a philosophical question.

There's also some holes, somehow a character does not realise they're losing their memories every day despite the fact that they walk past a pile of cans every single time they want to go to their rover indicating that they've been in the place way longer, but that's a minor problem.

The question of whether anything should even leave the planet is never discussed.

Unrelated:
I see that there's a review that's complaining about the game being woke, and uhhhh... HUH?

What? Why? How? Is it because the player character is a woman? Is it woke is bad, therefore bad is woke? What?

If it is because she's a woman, I really wonder how these people are going to function if they get a job and one of their bosses is a woman.

Thanks for leaving garbage (ACE) on my computer when uninstalling.

This game is trying to be Battlefield 2042, learning nothing from that game's mistakes, adding their own and being seriously flavourless.

The weapons also seem poorly balanced. Somehow a heavy recoil LMG does less damage than a less-recoiling rifle?

Also, why the hell did they name a white dude Uluru?
You don't need a consultant to figure that one out, just... google about it and look at its history. This is actually rather inappropriate.

This is coming from someone that has spent a lot of time in Warframe and has some issues with the gameplay in Warframe.

I do wish there was more out there that could be kind of like Warframe but with different gameplay with better balancing. Heck, I'd probably be willing to swap for that game if it was either paid or monetised in roughly the same way.

So with the above in mind: good luck, The First Descendant. You may have some flashy graphics, but you have negative amount of respect for players' time and wallets. I won't say this game won't survive, I can't predict that, but this given the competition, you need to be more generous and stay more generous to actually attract people.

While you can't really directly compare the gameplay in this and Warframe, if you have to pick one, the choice is easy.

Warframe is way more generous with just about anything than TFD.

Things you get in Warframe that you don't get in TFD either nearly as much or at all: free/in-game obtainable cosmetics, you keep colours for gear forever (thus everyone doesn't look the same) and can re-apply them at will, gear/character slots are way cheaper and you earn some for free, you can trade for premium currency.

The moment I saw there was a character slot limit that has to be paid for to be expanded and that I had no customization options for my character unless I paid, I lost all interest. I don't care how good your gameplay is. I don't want to see a clone army around me looking the same and you are never going to beat "re-usable colour palettes" from Warframe with this.

Please move New Game+ to the base game.

We will get to continue managing democracy with our fellow non-PSN account possessing Helldivers.

This game is fine now.

Honestly, don't get this. It has art made by machine learning (AKA. AI art).

It plays fine, it looks fine... at first.

But then it kind of hits you and everything suddenly looks incredibly ugly. It feels like art assets from different packages cobbled together in a way that doesn't work because they clash, only worse because suddenly you see all the weird computer-made flaws.