Conclusion

The First Descendant is a free-to-play cooperative multiplayer looter-shooter, but it can be played in single-player, too (just not offline, an internet connection is required). It reminds me a bit of Diablo with guns, in 3D, which isn't a bad thing. The game design is definitely inspired by many similar games like Warframe and Destiny, but I'm also getting vibes of Borderland, Halo and Gears of War. As expected, there is tons of loot to be found, which gives you plenty of choices to customize your build. While the story is pretty simple (bad aliens come to eat us, good heroes work together to defeat them), it's not that bad. I do like that you can skip cutscenes and dialogue line-by-line, so you can scan through the subtitles to still get an idea what's going on without having to listen for the voice acting, which happens to be fantastic. The First Descendant is published by Korean Nexon games who have a history of releasing P2W games, so be prepared to pay or grind if you want to participate in the endgame. It's free-to-play on Steam, so taking a quick look won't cost you anything.

The First Descendant is built using Unreal Engine 5 and impresses with its visuals. While it's not as amazing-looking as Hellblade II: Senua's Saga, it's easily one of the prettiest cooperative shooters. The world environments are richly detailed, too, thanks to Unreal Engine's Nanite geometry technology, which pretty much eliminates blocky polygons—check out our screenshots. The map designers did a great job keeping things varied and interesting. Character models are good, especially the main heroes, but lip sync is not that impressive.

As you've probably noticed in our screenshots, the image looks quite soft. This is especially visible on resolutions lower than 4K. The underlying reason is that the game forces TAA on you, with terrible quality settings—there is no way to turn this off using the in-game menu. Some people have posted tweaks for the game's engine.ini, enabling Epic TSR with custom settings instead, but so far no perfect solution has been found that really gives you that native look.

Unlike several other recent AAA releases, ray tracing is supported and there's even support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction. Unfortunately ray tracing doesn't make that much of a visual difference, even though it affects shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections and global illumination (both to a small extent only). The performance hit is pretty serious, but looking at our comparison images, "RT Medium" looks very similar to "RT Ultra," with only a minimal performance cost. Ray Reconstruction does have a small effect, but it's not worth it with DLAA. The benefits of RR with DLSS upscaling are more significant and enabling it is a good idea in this case.

The First Descendant has excellent support for upscalers: DLSS, FSR, and XeSS are all supported. In terms of Frame Generation you get support for both DLSS FG and FSR FG. This is not FSR 3.1 yet, so you have to enable FSR Upscaling for Frame Gen to be available, but native FSR AA can be selected, so the loss in image quality from upscaling is minimal. There's about two minutes of shader compilation when the game is first launched (or after a driver/hardware change). Some smart developer decided to call the standard loading screen "Preparing Shaders"—most of the time the game will load textures and models from disk, not compile shaders... oh well...

Handling movement input was tricky in the beta and one of the most criticized problems in the game. I'm happy to report that this is fixed completely, combat is very fluid and smooth. Mouse and keyboard controls work well, no need to use a gamepad.

Hardware requirements of the game are fairly high, but we've seen worse. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with the highest settings, no RT and no upscaling you need a RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 3070, RX 7700 XT or RX 6700 XT. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4070, RTX 3080, RX 6900 XT or RX 7800 XT. 4K60? That won't be easy—only the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 is able to reach over 60 FPS here, 67.7 FPS to be precise. AMD's fastest the Radeon RX 7900 XTX hits 56 FPS. With ray tracing (at "ultra"), FPS rates drop, and you need a RTX 4070 for Full HD at 60 FPS. 4K with ray tracing is possible with the RTX 4090—AMD cards are falling behind quite a lot, barely reaching 30 FPS at 4K. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a typical open-world area with vegetation, and buildings. There are some locations that get higher FPS though, but our test scene is not a worst-case. The game runs fairly similar on NVIDIA and AMD, slightly worse on Intel, but the differences aren't exactly huge compared to where we usually see the tested cards. All three GPU vendors have released Game Ready drivers for The First Descendant.

The settings performance scaling is very good. You can gain roughly 70% extra FPS with just settings—the visual quality degrades appropriately and gradually. I really like the way this is implemented, because it actually gives you meaningful options. Together with upscaling options, it should be possible to achieve decent framerates with any modern graphics card.

Our VRAM testing shows that The First Descendant is quite reasonable with its memory requirements, especially when considering the graphics offered. With less than 8 GB at 4K Ultra, you'll run out of GPU shading power long before VRAM becomes a problem. On the other hand, once you dial the eye candy up, i.e. RT + Frame Generation + Ray Reconstruction, you're reaching 13 GB at 4K, 8.5 GB at 1080p. The lowest possible details preset uses around 6 GB for all resolutions, which means the game should run pretty well on older cards, too.

So far I'm definitely liking my first playthrough of The First Descendant, the matchmaking works pretty well, too. I'm not sure if I'll have the time for the grind and endgame, and I'll definitely not pay for anything. Still, the game is worth checking out, especially if you're frustrated with Shadow of the Erdtree and need a change.