Now THIS is a game I have some history with. Way back in my high-school days, I found this game like most did: by the shareware version. I loved playing it immediately, getting very good at those first seven levels on my own. I even got together with kids in my class once a week to take over the school library and have 8-player matches against each other. It was a blast! And when I finally got a the official collection with this game and it's sequel late in the life of that 486 machine, I found myself loving everything that followed. But the game would ultimately fall to the side as I found my all-time favorite games on my next PC during the Windows 98 era, including the legendary Deus Ex.
So now as I play First Person games for Extra Life every week, I had planned to open up a much forgotten title I played long ago, only to have it have some serious technical issues I am still aging the fix to as we speak. So I needed a substitute. Looking back far further into my gaming past, my eyes fell on this gem. Does it still hold up? Well.. ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY!
But as a side note, I did not play the base game this time. Like so many FPS titles of the day, the game's code has since gone open source and as such there are several source ports you can use to make it run with some modern quality of life updates. I played this one using Dxx-Rebirth so my exact experiences may be different from yours. But I did include a link to get the port yourself if you wish. Just be aware I hold no responsibility for the software. Use it at your own risk and scan ANYTHING you download! Now with that out of the way, step inside.
Story: In the far-flung future of 2169, Earth no long relies on it's own resources, importing raw materials from mines spread across the solar system. However, when things go wrong, the company controlling these mines (The P.ost T.erran M.ining C.ompany or PTMC) has to take care of their lucrative properties. Today this situation has truly gotten dire.
Throughout the solar system, they have been losing control of these mines. A computer virus is spreading, taking control, and turning the machines within violent. The source of the infection is as of yet unknown, but believed to be alien in nature. It is also apparently acting with some form of intelligence as all projections point to an amassed army heading towards Earth itself. Their solution to this problem: you.
You are the "Material Defender": a mercenary pilot who's mission is to infiltrate each of the mines and detonate reactor within, preventing them from broadcasting the infection any further. The details of this will be supplied by a rather lengthy briefing as you start the game with a PTMC executive named S. Dravis which will outline both this, the hardware you will be given for your mission, as well as the inner monolog of your pilot (which admittedly is more amusing then Dravis is). Once you are through this opening, the story is basically all told: there is literally no development from here on in till the very end of the game and all "cutscenes" to follow till that last moment are simply intelligence briefs from the PTMC to inform you what they know about what the next mine may contain and what they can simply not confirm anymore. And while that is a little more then you might have found in many 8-bit console manuals, it's really not by much.
5/10
Graphics: Descent is a first person game from the days of MS-DOS, and it will show in what was impressive as hell graphical work at the time, but very much aged, if aged very well. You will spend the majority of the game from the view of your Pyro-GX's cockpit as you fly through rather blocky fairly simply rendered mazes that make up the mines you are infiltrating. In the original game, the resolution would also show it's age as the game was designed around a 320x200 resolution (there were ways to increase this, but not without losing the effect of the cockpit for your HUD and even then, still not up to anything really that close to modern), but with the Rebirth engine I was using, the game can be pushed to those modern resolutions without too much issue (although your cockpit is still the old image, so expect it to just be stretched to fit your screen. Still feels perfect, however).
Still the world itself as noted is rather simplistic in design, if deceptively so. There are no round edges as the maps themselves are designed from cube-like cells that are twisted, stretched, and shrunk in various ways to form the rooms and winding paths you will fly through. But add some well-made and varied textures and a lighting system baked into the map itself and these rather simple pieces of geometry take on a retro charm that will either bring out the nostalgia to someone old enough to have played the game when it came out or it's own joy to the newcomer who loves a good retro boomer-shooter and all the art style that usually entails.
You can apply this as well to most of the inhabitants of these worlds, too, as this is quite possibly the first game to use models for your enemies instead of sprites! (Yes, it beat out Quake and launched first.) Every enemy robot, while simple by today's standard, is crafted lovingly in 3D space and still look beautiful to this day. They even have basic animation where the model design allows it! Hell, even their (and your for that matter) attacks are sometimes physical objects. Every missile and laser bolt travels through space as a basically rendered object until it hits it's mark, and lights the room as one might expect until that moment. Yes there are a few more ammo types that do use a sprite instead, and every item you can collect is also a sprite (including the miners you can rescue), but even these look nice and fit the motif of the mines well, adding to the overall feel of a first person shooter despite the game not really playing like a traditional one, but we will get back to that when we get to gameplay.
The only real downside I can give to this is perhaps the most important tool you will have while playing: your map. Unlike other First Person games, this is the first of a sub-genre called "Six-Degrees-of-Freedom" games and in these titles, gravity need not apply. You can move freely on all three axis: forward, backward, left, right, up, and down. And the mines you will be exploring and destroying all take full advantage of that in their labyrinthine designs. To this end a map is more important then ever to avoid getting lost, and the game does provide one in the form of a see-through wireframe model you can pull up at any time. At first this will appear very straight forward... but only at first. As the maze is revealed most levels get complex quickly and there will be many times that in order to figure out where to go you will spend many a minute just maneuvering that map around just to get a clear picture of where to go next as there is no good way to distinguish how far away one room on the map might be from another and without such fenagling it can often look like an absolute mess.
8/10
Sound: Descent is a game that launched during the early days of PC games shipping on CD-ROM when the only games really taking advantage of the format at all were point and click titles, and even those came in two flavors: a version sold on 3.5 inch disks, installed completely to you PC's hard drive, and had no voices at all or shipped on and ran from a single CD-ROM using, the hard drive only to store saved games and settings, and using compressed voices so that the CD-ROM drives of the day could run them during the game. Action games that came on CD-ROM in those days generally did not get any benefit besides installing from a single disc instead of swapping them and potentially use the CD to play audio tracks for music.
And while the CD-ROM does offer the easier install, Descent offers no musical benefits, so no matter which version you got back them you had the same experience, which includes exactly ONE voice sample in the entire game to announce when a mine is about to blow up. It sounds great, if like ever 90s Sci-fi story thought a female voice from a computer system would sound, but one single sample is hardly worth mentioning, no matter how often you hear it. However the clarity should set the tone for the quality of what is about to hit your ear.
While every music track is clearly the kind of midi-instruments you would hear in most DOS games of the time, do not let that taint what you are about to hear before you hear it. Simply put, despite these limitations, this sound track is absolutely phenomenal. Sometimes a little mysterious and ominous, but almost always carrying an energy all it's own, this is a techno soundtrack that will keep you eager to keep fighting from start to end, If there is any complaint here at all, its the amount of tracks: Descent has 27 main levels, and you will notice some tracks repeat as you play.
However that is not to say the music alone sounds great here. It is backed by some great sound effects. Every laser blast sounds just right as you pew-pew your way through the mines, while missiles launch with a whoosh before silently cruising to their target (although if a heat-seeker is coming your way, you will hear the lock on pulse, it's speed corresponding to how close it is and adding extra tension to the moment). It sounds like a great scifi combat scene whenever the battle is hot and heavy... well, almost. The exception here is often one of the most useful weapons in the game: the vulcan cannon. This is effectively a chaingun, and while it can be very satisfying to see it disorientate enemies, the sound of it firing says less "chaingun" and more "rice crispies" making it somewhat disappointing here.
Thankfully the explosion of any and everything you destroy make up for any of it, as explosions are almost universally meaty sounding and it's always satisfying to hear you end the day of yet another virus infected robot. But the rest of their sounds have a bit of a range here. These are machines and most of them make a mechanical screech when they see you of one kind or another which sound descent enough, but more importantly give you some idea of what you saw you and how to respond... with two exceptions: hulks and drillers.
Hulks are frankly silent, making them annoying if you don't spot them, but the sound you will absolutely fear is the mechanical roar of a class-1 driller who just saw you and is ready to unload it's own vulcan cannon in your face, but again we will talk about this in the next section. Overall though this is a classic boomer shooter in the sound department with great music, descent sound, and more meaty explosions then you ever thought you wanted but will absolutely love.
8/10
Gameplay: As noted in the graphical section, you will play Descent from the cockpit of your Pyro-GX, a space-ship with the unique ability to behave more like a hover-ship with full freedom of movement (which is why this type of game is now called a "six degrees of freedom" or a "6doF" game). You will fly forward, backward, left right, up, and down with no regard for the laws of gravity as you navigate the mines with the ultimate goal in each one of finding the reactor at the end, blowing it up, and escaping through the clearly marked exit before the self-destruct sequence this causes. If this sounds simple, it's because it is. Descent has no real complex objectives as you travel through 27 missions (up to 30 if you find the hidden secret levels), but simple does not mean easy.
In order to access the reactor of each mine, you will have to find the three keycards, granting you access to open additional doors, all color coded by priority: blue, yellow, then red. Every mine uses all three and require you find them in that order before your final goal. But of course you can't possibly think you won't face opposition in a shooter, now can you? In your way is an ever growing hoard of robots ultimately reaching 20 varieties before the game is over, each one with it's own unique weapons and behaviors: from the first orange drones you see to massive purple hulks wielding fusion cannons that, if they hit you with it, can (at least on rookie, the normal difficulty) eat 70 points of your shield in a single hit! And while this is not a game that likes to go easy on the player, most of these enemies are actually fair... with the exception of two: red hulks and class-1 drillers.
Class-1 drillers are straight up horrific, not because they take a lot of damage to kill, but because of how quickly they can eat your shields (which is effectively your health). They are the only hit-scan enemy in the game, so there is no avoiding their attack if they get a shot at you, and since it's effectively a chain gun, the rate of fire means that shot is going to absolutely do damage before you can land enough shots to take them down. Often these are placed in positions where they are waiting around corners and other places you have to know in advance if you want a prayer of avoiding this and if you hear that mechanical screech only they make, it's already too late. However, if you DO know where it is, a well placed heat-seeker missile will dispatch one of these things pretty easy, which gets us to the other big issue: the red hulks.
Red hulks are frankly the most evil thing you will meet in this game outside of it's two boss encounters. They are silent as hulks usually are, except the sound of heat-seeking missile they fire at you and the sound of your own lock-on alarm as it gets closer to you... and it will. These things have incredible tracking and turning ability, so if you are fired on, you are just about assured you will get hit, and when you find yourself down a corridor without any place to duck around you might as well assume you are eating it. The only advantage you have is this incredible ability of heat-seekers is universal, so if you can bring one close enough to get a lock, they have no way to really dodge you either. While most enemies will punish you if you rush in without a plan, these are both more likely to just punish you and if you don't watch it, you will likely lose a life fairly quickly.
Which brings us to the other odd quirk of this game. When it came out, most PC games were assumed to let you save any time you like often even including a quick-save function. While I never used it, Descent is no exception to this. However as this became a standard, two other functions key to how Descent's balance works were abandoned by most other games: Lives and score. You will start with three lives and while you can occasionally find more in the mines, a much more reliable way to get them is score. In this way the game is exceptionally generous since many enemies are worth 500 or more points, you get a healthy supply of bonus points after every mission, and it rewards you one every 100,000 points. This will prove useful at least on occasion because when you die in Descent, you don't restart the mission. Rather your ship blows up, spewing most of the upgrades you had at the time and a new one drops at the start of the level. Everyone you destroyed is still gone and you are able to collect your cache of stuff, making where you die as important as if. Sometimes if you think you are not going to make it anyway, it might just be worth backtracking to somewhere convenient before just finishing yourself off so you can get to that cache easier.... but that brings us to the last thing you may have to consider when doing this... hostages.
The robots were never the only things in these mines, as there are miners who have hidden themselves away in a cells you can find while you play. It isn't necessary to save them, but it's usually worth it between the 1,000 points on pickup and the bonuses you can get for having them on your ship when you leave (if you die, all the hostages on your ship die with you). This can greatly speed up life collection, adding to that balance.
But for all that information, how does it actually play? Well really incredibly smooth! In the days of MS-DOS I played this completely on keyboard, but the Rebirth engine also makes it easy to setup with modern keyboard and mouse to feel smooth and natural, keeping the combat fluid and all the tension from the battle, not from wrestling controls. This is a game that just feels amazing even today.
8/10
Bugs: While playing I was unable to see many bugs. In fact, I only really noticed one bug and a little bit of inconvenience, both likely due to the 3rd party engine I used to play the game.
- Intelligence isn't always easy to read: The screen to introduce each level is not always as clear as it could be as bright green font against the bright areas of a picture (like clouds on the surface of a planet we are looking over) can make it VERY tough to read. This is far from a huge deal since nothing they say is necessary to complete the game, but if you mean to read them be ready to squint once in a while
- What's that last slot? This, while even less significant seems like an actual bug in the Rebirth engine. When going to load a saved game, there is an additional slot listed that is not available when saving. As a result, you will ALWAYS see an "Empty" slot at the bottom of your games list.
Digital Rights Management: As this is a game that currently ships with DOSBox, there is no DRM on it. Add to this an open source engine port and its not only DRM free but completely portable the way I played it.
Source: PC Gaming Wiki
Score: When I was in high school, this game was my first person shooter of choice, and I am happy to say I had some good taste back then. I won't say it's the greatest thing since slice bread as it definitely has a good number of "bullshit" design choices when it comes to level design (which could be common back in the day), but the moment to moment is every bit as fun as I remembered and this is definitely still a unique first person shooter more people should experience.
8/10
System Requirements:
- Intel 386
- 4 MB RAM
- VGA Graphical support
- MS-DOS 5.0
- 20 MB Hard Drive space
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
- dxx-rebirth
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