I just started playing The First Descendant — literally, just this morning — so I can't tell you if it's worth your time. I've only put in an hour. But I can tell you that it takes only one moment to know that The First Descendant is a good game by my extremely subjective criteria. That moment was when the game instructed me to press R1 to use my grappling hook.
The First Descendant Already Has Me Grappling Hooked
Grappling hooks are basically always fun to use, but I've recently run into some mediocre implementations of gaming's greatest traversal tool, and it's bummed me out. It seems like this should be harder to mess up than it is to get right. Quickly zipping from one point to another using a cool rope with a hook on the end? There's simply nothing better.
But when I played Immortals of Aveum last year, one of my pettiest (but most deeply felt) gripes was that it really fumbled the grappling hook. Ascendant Studios' FPS was trying to ape the feel of id's modern Doom games, but it forced you to come to a stop and angle your reticle onto an extremely narrow point in the distance before you could zip to it. Instead of feeling like a way to build momentum and express yourself through movement, it brought all the energy to a halt.
More recently, I've been frustrated to see that Rise of the Ronin has a loose grip on the grapple. So far, my ronin has a couple different traversal tools at their disposal: a grappling hook and a glider. The glider does exactly what you want, opening when you press X and staying open until you it or hit the ground. Like in Breath of the Wild, you can even use it for very short distances, so if you don't want to take fall damage when dropping off a high roof, you can just pop it open and safely drop down.
Though it nails the glider, Rise of the Ronin's grappling hook is frustrating. There are certain points on roofs or rock walls that you can grapple to, but they're pretty inconsistently placed. You can't really plan to use your grappling hook, like Spider-Man leaping off of a skyscraper into a webswing; you can only use it sporadically, when the opportunity arises.
The First Descendant Nails The Fundamentals
The First Descendant is in my good graces already because it doesn't fumble this mechanic right out of the gate. It gives you a grappling hook during the tutorial, a length of yellow energy beam that can attach to (as far as I can tell this early into the game) any surface. You can rotate the stick to alter your trajectory mid-flight. You can zip up a wall, into the ground, or barrel into an enemy. It does all the things you want it to do, and in a looter-shooter like TFD, having a flexible, fun-to-use movement tool is a fantastic way to break up the monotony that can plague the genre.
More than that, nailing the grappling hook tells me that the developers have their priorities straight. Or rather, they're prioritizing the stuff I care about. There might be all kinds of other issues with The First Descendant — its monetization, drop rates, and hardmode matchmaking — but I don't really care about that stuff. I'm planning to play this game solo, and it's free-to-play, which means I haven't spent a dime on it and will drop it the second it stops being fun. And, right now at least, zipping around and shooting dudes is really, really fun.
