It's fun? It's like the Fast & Furious or The Expendables of gaming. It's kinda silly, the story is scarcely believable at all if you spend a second thinking about it, it's gratuitous and over the top, it's pretty mentally empty. But it's fun.

Missions are great, they're heavily focused on actually sniping. Which for some reason many of these games aren't? Slow motion kill cam is always satisfying. Pretty short, which is welcome since the game isn't super deep. But it's not super shallow, there's a couple playstyles and strategies depending which style of sniper rifle you use.

Neat game. Worth it for free on PS+ or like $10 on sale (which happens often enough).

People ask a lot of a free game. Too much, I'd say. Is The First Descendant a soulless, proper noun-deluge of thoughtless fan service sprinkled with an overuse of particle effects? Sure. Absolutely. Is it totally free for like 75 hours of pretty entertaining gameplay with enjoyable gunplay? Also, yes.

What more do you want? At no point does The First Descendant pretend it's anything other than it is. I think in many ways a great comparison is the movie series Rebel Moon. The key difference is that The First Descendant doesn't have a Zack Snyder behind it desperately trying to convince you that it isn't dog shit sprayed with chrome spray paint.

Rebel Moon is just a nonstop lore dump of exposition you don't care about by characters that are not engaging. The movie never gives you a reason to really care. It just talks at you. Like someone reading a half-baked, lazily written history textbook of a universe you know nothing about. And then they jazz it up with a bunch of explosions and lasers. It's awful. But if you walk into it because you just wanna see explosions, you'll have an okay time. What becomes grating is the fact that you have to pay for Netflix for it and you have to listen to Zack Snyder and his insufferable fanbase scream at you about how it's better than it is.

The First Descendant is all of the former without the latter. You get a bunch of cutscenes with horrible voice acting shouting random proper nouns, that sound increasingly stupid, while kind of lazily built 3D models of sexy Korean women move their mouths out of sync with their voicelines. But you can skip those cutscenes most of the time. To keep things trudging along. You don't need to know shit about the plot to have fun shooting and looting. You don't have to pay anything to play it, at least through the entire campaign which is ~100 hours if you include the hard mode map. And you don't have anyone in a fanbase yelling at you that the game is actually super high quality and really deep.

So what more do you want? What's the issue? Gunplay is fun. Loot is fun. The customization of your character is actually shockingly deep in terms of how you can manipulate stats. Is the gacha a bit predatory? Of course. Are several elements severely grindy? Absolutely. Is there a bunch of expensive packages that will significantly simplify and speed up the grind putting whales ahead of free players? Absolutely.

But it's a F2P game? What else do you want? What do you expect? Just like you can pour ten thousand hours into Apex or League or DOTA or Runescape, you can pour that into The First Descendant. Just like those games, the gameplay is quite fun. If you're willing to put up with the grind, you'll never get gated. If you wanna pay, then pay. If you don't, don't.

But for the genuine fun gameplay you'll get out of The First Descendant for a free price, it's hard to call the game trash. Skip every cutscene and blast your way through enemies until you're bored. Once you're bored, uninstall and move on. But you'll get ~100 hours out of shooting Glip Glorps and Snazzlewogs to defeat T H E C O M I N G and save OBSERVATORY or whatever. And you'll have fun doing it.