Descent: Revisited - A Videogame Review 

I was addicted to this game in high school. In my classes all I could think about was getting home so I could play until bed.

I spent so many hours on Descent, the freedom of movement after bingeing on Doom was an absolute revolution. I still can't understand why this franchise hasn't been continued.

One of the very few true 6 degrees of freedom and gameplay designs -- outside flight and space simulators.

Descent 2 is the game responsible for training me as a kid to never lose my direction going upside down, loopdeloop, rolldiroll. There's a reason why I favor playing Alien in AvP or always rolling in Ace Combat games.

Descent was one of the first games I played on my first PC, back in 97, I'll never forget the sensation of blowing my first reactor and escaping the level. Simple mechanic, but extremely immersive. Even today I love games that ask me to leave the level after completion (like Star Wars Dark Forces). This is the best Descent 1 & 2 review on youtube, very concise and well written. Thank you.

As someone in the later half of his forties, I can add something essential: Before Descent, there was never a true 3D 6-axis game on PC. It genuinely was the first in this regard. But if you didn't grow up with 486'es and DOS gaming, you may have a hard time grasping that significance. Before, there was Wolfenstein 3D. Which wasn't fully 3D, the map was still 2D. Then there was Doom, which was still on a 2D map. You may even have heard of Duke Nukem, also from that era. 3D'ish, sure, but on a sinlge-plane map. At best that could be called 2.5D. It's difficult to convey just how mind-blowing Descent was in this regard. Just calling it revolutionary doesn't quite capture _why_ it was so ground breaking. All of a sudden you had 6 degrees of freedom. Movement on 3 axis _and_ rotation around 3 axis. You had to use a lot more keys to properly get around! Up to this point, no game had done this! Keep in mind that this came out before the original Quake shook the PC gaming world. In other words: the appreciation for this game really depends on what you experienced game-wise before you first encountered it. If that moment would be post-Quake it wouldn't be as impressive.

I played this game so much. It's a total classic. I used to wonder what happened to the hostages after you escaped the mine, if not before, after picking them up. Vertigo 1 was quite a small craft after all lol

I remember seeing my dad play Descent when I was a kid. Gaming was different back then.

As a kid I was blown away by Descent 1 and 2. The 6 degrees of freedom, the enemies made of polygons (before Quake did it!) and the fully 3D map that you can rotate and zoom. It was a technological feat. And the gameplay, holy crap. As a kid, after having played pseudo-3D games like Doom and DN3D, I was so sure Descent was the future of first-person gaming. It's too bad that 6DOF shooters have been such a niche through the years. Descent 2 was even better, with the guide bot. Some of my favourite memories were shooting flares at doors to open them from a distance (to prevent being ambushed), and firing guided missiles that let you fly them with a remote camera. Even though I played all these retro games with keyboard only as a kid, I'm glad for modern remakes like DXX Rebirth and GZDoom. DXX Rebirth works great with a gamepad as well, letting me smoothly glide through the tunnels rather than the bumpy experience of KB/M.

I found a copy of Descent during a random trip to Goodwill back in college and got hooked! I haven't even played through the others yet.

Just found this. Descent was the first game I ever owned myself. Changed my life... This review is fantastic! Thank you!

Overload was actually originally built as a Descent sequel and was even intended to carry the Descent name. The devs even had the rights to the name but there was a legal battle and in the end they got the rights to the game itself but not the name.

i never really played the single player campaign. however, where this game really shined was multiplayer deathmatches. me and my buddy's would get together and all bring our PCs on a friday evening to a friends house who had the space for 10 plus people and there bulky baege boxes plus bulkier CRTs and played this and command and conquer, warcraft 2 and revolt till late sunday night. man does where some dreadful and sleepy mondays at work. but it was soooo worth it. descent was such a blast. to bad nobody is doing a modern take on this 90s gem.

When I was a kid I could zoom around this game non-stop. Now it gets me motion sick pretty fast!

The first startup! The music and the first video sequence... I was blown away... Played it in multiplayer with my best friend with 9600 baud rate serial... One of the best multiplayer fun ever!

Very much looking forward to the Descent 3 video!

I played this game in the 90s on our family's apple computer. We actually had a joystick that worked with it. Coolest fucking thing ever for me as a little kid at the time.

one of my faves. Once i got bored I played all the levels upside down, and it went fine but after I finished I had serious vertigo and dizziness for several minutes.

This game was mind blowing back in the day, and Descent 2 just kicked it up even more. I never got around to 3, but I heard 3 didn't do so well.

that epic feel when you , after a long claustrophobic crawl through tight halls ,enter a monumental main room and then all hell breaks loose....

I remember buying my first joystick to play Descent properly! Sadly, I only had a 386 back then, so gameplay was pretty choppy. My brother couldn't play it at all, due to motion sickness, but I pushed on through. (This was definitely one of those games, where the sticker on the box - "Plays better with Intel" - wasn't just a marketing gimmick!)

I absolutely lived this game and Descent II back in the day! I don't think I've ever even played the story mode though 😂 didn't even know it had a story! It was all about the online multi-player for me. I loved playing this game against other players online via the dial-up Kali gaming network back then! This was also the first time I got introduced to "hacking" videogames as well, as one of those online players showed me how you could hex edit the game to do stuff like clip through walls during multi-player matches, and get invincibility, unlimited ammo, etc.

This and terminal velocity were my go to games back then.

Excellent review, very well written and put together. I really enjoyed watching this. Descent is such an awesome game, it's insanely fun and challenging. I completed both D1 and 2 in 2019 and had an awesome time.

Great video! Can't wait for your take on Descent 3 and all the games ever made!

Its the first game having 3D Model enemies. It wasnt quake. Right? :D Also the AI is way ahead of its time. Not just a basic "run towards player in airline, shoot when in LOS" ai. The skill level design is amazing too. Influencing all the indirect like shield powerup efficiency, ai aggressiveness, ai projectile speed, ai amount of shots per attack and so on is so much better than fighting against damage/HP multipliers or removed and replaced enemies and powerups. This way the gameplay stays the same experience and the weapons feel the same strong. I absolutely love the level design. It fits so nice to the planets. It gets even better in Descent 2. I'm disappointed about Descent 3 though. In Descent 3 on higher difficulties the weapons feel all super weak, the ai dodges way too fast on very wide space most of the time, while the ai got dumb too - they just fly fast, but all the intelligence and strategy and variety of strategies they had were suddenly gone in Descent 3. Very disappointed about that. I wish dxx-rebirth would support VR though

i have broken seven joysticks over my lifetime and every single one was because of this series

mouse + keyboard? sheesh, get an oldschool joystick, son!

Heck yeah! Descent games are an experience, and Overload as far as I'm concerned is a true successor!!!!

Good review, i hope you make more of these.

Loved these games while growing up. I look forward to your Descent 3 review!

10:46 That f*#@^ng Thief Bot was the bane of my existence back in the day! I hated that little f*&^%r with the power of a thousand suns. I became convinced that the damn thing had an actual personality the more I played.

Thanks for this review. I loved D1 and 2 back when I was a student. Played the hell out of these games. And D2 even allowed for multi-player, the second game I've ever played in my college's LAN (the first being Doom 2). Ah, the memories...

Man, this is the first game series I have any memory of, so I've got a seriously rose-tinted memory. So much I could say about this. I got all the extra missions I could find for this. I ended up making my own levels with the mission builder (which still exists in the form of DLE XP). In a way, I think this prepped me as a child to learn how to use CAD software later. I played this some on an early 3D VR helmet called the VFX1, which is a lot like modern VR actually - right down to the nausea. Oh, and mouses sucked in the mid 90s. Had to be very careful not to press too many keys at once or it would overload the few keyboard interrupts you had when you tried to tri-chord with only a keyboard.

Great video! Such a unique game. Super surprised there hasn't been modern clones.

1 Comfortably played D1 + 2 on Hotshot with keyboard only. Took many hours of practice, but I loved these games anyways. 2 I also love the Class A driller, because its AI allows it to play hide and seek. A single homing missile is enough, but that guy won't just sit there and take it. Yes, I actually enjoy hunting these guys down. 2b Descent 2 did have hitscan vulcans (IIRC, at least close to), if you turned up the difficulty. Those small ITDs are now the new Class A driller (albeit weaker) and you'll face them constantly from level one onwards. 3 D1's music would start over on level 23, as there were only 22 tracks + 5 more for credits, menus etc. 4 As for motion sickness: turn off "auto leveling"! 11:46 ... the game automatically tries to align your ship to the surface below, so you're constantly getting rolled around. Turn that crap off and you'll glide to the mines much more smoothly. 5 If you have one of these 3D TVs, which you barely used, give Descent a shot in stereoscopic.

Drillers ended so many of my runs as a kid. Still loved the game.

Descent Max released on Playstation 1, it had a lighting and soundtrack overhaul and looked quite good at the time.

The creator of Decent has recently made a VR game which is the spiritual successor to Decent. Its pretty much Decent VR. It's really good.

Haven't heard of descent until now, and i really like the uniqueness of this game. sorta reminds me of star wars. it is also cool and interesting that this is a 90's game, which makes it really impressive. the video also has great commentary, so nice job mate! keep up the good work.

You haven't played Decent until you had Team Anarchy matches over the company's LAN at 2 PM. 😂

I'm fairly certain I used to play Descent with CH Flightstick back in the 90's. It was truly a marvelous game. I don't think I ever beat this though, the levels got so complex and enemies so numerous that my computer just died. 6 degrees of freedom reminds me bit of Aliens vs. Predator, the old one.. you should check it out if you haven't. It's got playable xenomorph which is also quite disorienting to play as it can run along walls and ceilings while predators and humans are confined to just ground. Super cool level design for xenomorphs.

Really good video, amazed that your subscriber count is so modest. Incremented by one :)

My first experience with Descent is back when the Gorillaz first album came out. My friend was showing me the game while we were listening to the album. I had just found my first hostage when M1A1 came on. If you're not familiar with the song, there's a spooky bit at the beginning where someone is desperately pleading "hello! Let me out of here!". I thought it was in the game and was blown away with the detail only to realize it was the song. To this day I think that song title sounds like a Doom or other boomer shooter level name. Like Mission 1 Area 1.

Truly loved this game, sunk hours into it and playing death match in it was just too much fun. Descent is one of the few games I actually outperformed my classmates in high school on :D

The story is perfectly fine. A good story doesnt have to be book length.

I have not returned to descent since fall 2010. But this game was a big part of my game rotation growing up. As a kid I owned the demo version which came free with the family pentium overdrive 200 machine. Then shortly after my dad bought descent 2. I sunk so many hours in this in the lower difficulties. I do not think I beat the game without cheats as a kid though it was not until spring semester of my freshman year of college in 2009 that I finally beat descent 2 all the way through in one of the hardest difficulties without cheating. By fall 2010 i got a full copy of the original game, played through it for the first time, then immediately went to descent 2 again where everything while a lot easier, was an overall better experience because lack of cheap fights. Descent 3 was my goto game for a little over a year in around 2001. It bought it when it dropped to 10$, and played through the game once and spent hours upon hours playing monster ball in multi player. I have attempted to play descent 3 again over the years, such as when I last beat descent 2 again in 2010, but descent 3 just has not aged as well in regards to the feel. In Descent 3 it always felt while technically a 6 degrees of freedom like its predecessors, the title forced your camera in certain orientations.

The phenomenon 'Computer game skill' didn't event exist......... until Descent. ps: The loborinthic design is one of the coolest thing of the game. PPS: don't ever, EVER, compare Descent to Duke Nukem or Doom! for the rest, nice vid :)

i am not sure about the keyboard statement because i remember playing the first one with a stick and keyboard combination. but yes it was an amazing game.

This was a great game, and actually pretty easy to control well in 6 DOF just using keys. Great fun in multiplayer too.

Used to play this as a kid with my younger brother. I used to pilot the ship and he used to shoot. Fast Forward to today, there's this game called Overload, Spiritual successor to the Descent Series. I hope you have tried that one as well.

I hope you do a tour through all the other good "flight shooters" of the era. I was a big fan of Tie Fighter when it came out 20 years ago. I remember wanting that sith tattoo so bad.

3:03 I don't remember exactly why or how, but I used to play Descent keyboard only as a kid too... something to do with these shoddy early mouses back then I guess... the stubborness we have as kids to achieve something is interesting to look back upon 🤣🤣should have used all that energy to learn how to code 🤣👍

Note: Some of the best players play keyboard-only. The mouse simply doesn't have enough degrees of freedom/buttons to be worth it. There's a guy making 100% insane speedruns on RU-vid who does that, for example.

One of my all time favorites, but I never beat it because I get sick of being perpetually lost after a while. Also the engine is highly underrated. Wish there had been other types of games made with it (or maybe there were and I just don't know bout them).

Thanks and make sure to follow up with Freespace!

Well, i started playing this game when i was like 5-7 years old and since that time i was quite often playing games through my life. I found that all parts of Descent are in Steam (and i was really amazed by this fact, instantly bought it like 2-3 weeks ago). All i wanna say that even ACE difficulty is so hard and requires actual effort to beat it. Old gaming experience, not this new casual model. Also level 7 on Desc 1 was my like daily routine where i was loading after red door for couple weeks and tried hard and finally did it lol. p.s. when i started playing this again couple weeks ago with mouse and kb, i was truly amazed at how i managed to control with basic keybindings when i was kid lol

Finally! Someone who DIDN'T like Half Life! I knew you existed! "The the plot's so good!" The fans cry. Er, Steven King, The Mist, 1980? (but I must admit, seen the movie, never read the book so...?) And whats with the 'kill a few enemies then spend 2 hours in a huge maze working out how to get out only to enter another huge maze, kill a few enemies then spend...?' Game loop? How is that enjoyable as apposed to face palm boring? It's like the early Lara Croft games. How is running around a maze for hours looking for a lever fun? Man. Didn't get it, don't get it, will never get it. But hey, they're real popular games so, guess that's just me. Descent 1 and 2? Belong squarely next to Doom and better than Quake in my book. Bought an analog joystick with thruster for this game and if you ain't pedal to the metal, finger firmly on the trigger? Your going the wrong way. Strangely, the last modern game that brought back these feelings? Nier Automata. Played it on a pc with a controller. In my 50's and still banging bad guys. Waiting for Overload (lets see if I puke in VR!!!) and Boltgun to come on sale on Steam and off we go again! Thanks for the trip down memory lane dude - rocking!

I remember using mouse and joystick on these games as a kid.

Overload is a worthy successor.

I personally find Descent 2 harder. Trainee was made easier though. At insane the Material Centers (the purple walls which spawn robots) are also now infinite waves. In Descent 1 it was also on insane 3 waves On the high difficulties I really must say the difficulty is rather increased.

Great Review. Good times on my 486PC.

Overload is another great game in the same flavor and some of the same devs, but built using modern tech.

Level 27 boss is easy. You can literally kill it invulnerable ^^ Find the secrets :P The Descent 2 final boss was difficult, yes. In general Descent 2 bosses are much tougher :)

I never, ever got motion sickness playing Descent while growing up, and still don't today. I find it strange that there are only 2 games that have ever done this to me: 007: Nightfire for the Gamecube, after playing all day and Half-Life 2 for the PC, after roughly 15 minutes(!) of play. At this point I'm pretty sure people are just wired differently.

now you gotta play the successors: Freespace 1 and 2. the pinnacle of Volition/Interplay.

Not sure if it's a false memory, but I could swear I played Descent 1&2 in DOS with mouse and keyboard back when they came out.

My friend played it while I was watching and it was late and I needed to go home from him. It took like 2-3 hours whole section but before I left I vomited his toilet. My first experience with it.

nice video!

I can't be one hundred percent for certain but I vaguely remembered descent actually starting as a quake mod and then the game had such promise that a publisher picked it up and pay them to develop a full standalone game.

This review was great! never got to play those games, because using the keyboard for it looked too complex for me at the time. Do you know if it plays well with a Joystick? I still have my old MS sidewinder force feedback2

Not a bad video at all! As a fan of the series, Descent and Descent 2 do allow for play with a mouse and keyboard. Select the mouse as the control method, then customize your keyboard controls to use the appropriate buttons for movement. I'm a fan of WSAD for forward/back/left/right, Space for slide up, C for slide down, and Q/E for rolling left/right.

Looks and plays like Forsaken for the Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64. I liked that game a lot.

we used to play this at the college computer lab :D

3:12 I played and play it only (!) with keyboard! 😁 Most of the ship’s controls are on the numpad and that’s how I used it to play when I was 15 and never changed it. I fly the ship as flying with a joystick - nearly 30 years of muscle memory 😅

Freespace/ Freespace silent threat / Freespace 2 / Freespace Open project hold a spot in the top 5 best games of all time

I had a demo of the first level early in the PS1 days and thought the freedom of movement was interesting but not enough to actually buy the game

The thumbnail looks like a smiley face.

AMD Athlon and Pentium II PCs intensified!

I was watching this video wondering why the music sounded SO, so different to me, but then I remembered, I played this game on MAC, and it must have had different sound processing. Anyone else experiencing this?

"The one you don't want to hear sounds like a digitized power drill" Ohhhhhhhhh..... It's a *DRILL*? I spent my whole life thinking it was supposed to sound like a pig.

use the numpad keys for turning in descent its the best way to play when i was a kid i never messed with the controller settings it was scary to me lol

Descent: Freespace and (especially) Freespace 2

When I play this game, I use both the wasd and arrow keys to move and look around. I haven't tried using mouse look.

I was pretty disappointed learning from creating test maps on Descent 2’s level editor that the Class 1 Driller and Red Hulk didn’t have the same terrifying sound and damage. The red haze too when getting hit was severely toned down 🫠

The source port I highly recommend to avoid is d2 XL its a beginners trap boasting a huge set of features, but the engine is unstable, no longer supported, balance is busted for enemy homing Rockets. And the performance is all over the place; you also need to spend 20 minutes to get it to look and feel how you want; Also avoid descent RTX as it was built around the first 7 levels; the rest of the game does not have true support as they are missing PBR materials as well as emissive textures; However a new engine that was just released labeled inferno is the new kid on the block and has the most promise Edit: the pros to descent RTX and inferno are they should support a robust FOV slider to alleviate motion sickness

Ok i like descent as well but half life 1 is a very fun shooter, story aside (i personally like the story). The weapons are punchy and fun to use, the enemies really are a step forward for old games. Black mesa is a great environment for action. In my opinion, companies learned the lessons they wanted to from half life. Some companies wanted to add more cinematic sequences to make fps good for consoles. Other companies made faster and faster fps games. Half life is the peak of the boomer shooter era. I hope you revisit it and understand why people speedrun it and still deathmatch and play the story in coop

I want to play this again, glad to hear there are port cause last time I tried it was a mess. I definitely played a lot of Descent when I was a kid, but I used a joystick (My dad's friend apparently brought it to work and let him borrow because "he couldn't get any work done with it around". I don't remember if it was 1 or 2, but I think it was around '98... I need to check out the 3rd game, I've never seen it.

I play only with keyboard and I can get quite far on the Ace skill level. Although I will say that you could play the original DOS version with mouse & keyboard-You had to install a mouse dos driver.

You should check out forsaken if you like descent, probably the best descent clone I've played

Please tell me you have checked out Overload, same developers. Feels exactly like Descent, just better overall. Very hard but fair, no Bullshit enemies like the driller.

@3:05 That's not true - I played the game back when it came out and you could play with keyboard, joystick or mouse. You could even rebind the controls to make the game play exactly like the Overload (spiritual successor released not so long ago). I have the vanilla game running on DOSBox right now with mouse+keyboard setup. The game even supported VR head gear back in the day (VFX-1). That's similar what people say about DOOM - that it was keyboard only, which is also not true. Even the in-game demos showcase gameplay with mouse... Doom also had an optoin to rebind controls in its setup program (where you set up the sound card etc.) so you could basically create a modern control scheme with WASD + mouse. Heck, even Wolfenstein 3D supported mouse control. I don't know why people forget this? Maybe they are just too young and didn't fact-check this themselves?

The original on DOS does also have mouse control. People thought I was insane, but I played mouse and keyboard the whole way through. Apparently the "right" way to do it was with a joystick. Pssshhh... I also use inverted mouse, so I guess maybe I am insane?

In my opinion, the quality of the levels drop sharply after the Jovian levels (i.e. at Jupiter - after Level 14). The level designs become both unnecessarily labyrinthine and repetitive, and the new robots introduced by level 16 are now more annoying than challenging (i.e. the Gopher robots), and they look uninspired by now. You can see how bored the dev team had become by looking at the levels at Uranus - the name for the Oberon Iron Mine, and Oberon Platinum Mine (Level 20-21) were mixed up (the briefing vs. level name). And when you get to Neptune, the name of the first Neptunian level (Level 21) is "Neptune Storage Depot" but in reality Neptune has no solid surface to build a depot on. Also, did you noticed how uninspired and lazy the loading screen of the Neptunian levels are? It's just a boring blue Neptune with a black surface of a moon upside down. Also, when you reach Level 23 (Triton Storage Mine), the music goes back to the music of Level 1 and then 2, 3 etc. They ran out of ideas by then.

Love this game. The Pyro GX is my favoritel little ship!

Love the game. Playing it currently on PS1. BTW... you finish all 27 levels in 6 hours?

KALI and endless years playing online.

0:48 I like you.

Hrrm... Descent 2... there are hitscan enemies that are actually worse than the first game's drillers, but they've been adjusted more to the difficulty level to the point where you won't even notice you're being hit if you're playing on a low or medium skill. On Trainee and Rookie it is definitely easier across the board. But it can be a nasty surprise if you're trying to make your way up through the skill levels and once you reach Ace or so you're suddenly having to pay lots of attention to enemy types you've barely even had a reason to notice before. :) It's still an improvement and even on higher skills the game is overall fairer than the first, but I wouldn't go so far to call it easier. In the first game if you're struggling with either boss it's probably because you didn't explore the level enough beforehand, all the equipment you need to power through them without taking so much as a scratch is there if you look hard enough and don't waste it beforehand. The boss fights in the second game can get a lot stingier on you and they can be much nastier than anything the first game did. Vertigo Series expansion probably strikes the best bossfight balance between challenge and fairness but it once again only has two. Overload did a pretty decent job at it too, it did maybe err a little too far on the easy side with its first and last bosses but I still like the middle one a lot.

Why do you say that the Descent 1 final boss room is poorly designed? I thought it was great when I was a kid. Very challenging, but ultimately doable if you've mastered 6DOF movement.