This is game is wish.com Descent. This is Descent if Temu sold it. This is Descent if you went to fiverr and asked a kid to make a game in a week. This game is what happens when a bunch of script kiddies believe they can make a better 6DoF game, but clearly lack the skills and experience to do it. But they storm forward anyways, god bless their horribly misplaced optimism.
It seems for every good game in a genre, there needs to be a bad one. And Forsaken fits that description.
For a little history and context, the Descent trilogy was a special part of my life growing up. I played the hell out of all three games, offline and online (especially online). It was easily my favorite game and genre. To this day, I can still recognize when a game tries to capture that feel, and how close they get (Overload is a wonderful example). So to that end, Forsaken has also had a special, wretched place in my life as well.
Forsaken was made and marketed as a direct competitor to Descent. Primarily Descent 2 as it would be another year until Descent 3 released. It had GPU rendering and lighting, mission-based levels, and a plethora of characters to pick from.
And that’s where any praise for it ends.
Even during its prime, it was still shadowed by the still superior Descent 2. And when Descent 3 released, Forsaken’s short lived life was snuffed out by the third installment, making the idea that it was any sort of competition for Descent a laughable offense at best.
But an offense it still remained.
I knew of its existence even during my early years. Seeing a remastered version of it for sale on Steam, I figured it was time to experience what Acclaim thought was a 6DoF game. And wow, I am glad it was on sale.
It is a bad game. I will admit, it started out okay at best. It didn’t feel like Descent by a long shot, more an imposter or cheap clone. But it wasn’t bad. Just not good either. I was content to just give it a neutral rating and leave it there.
But then I played more of it. And it got worse, and worse, and worse. The more I played, the more awful things I uncovered. My time in it slowly shifted from being curious about it, to playing it to the end out of spite.
Having done that, I can safely say this game fails on several fronts.
The gameplay; it’s bad. It’s designs come from the Gary Gygax’s twisted psych combined with amateur design and programming. Enemies will consistently spawn in, even after clearing a room. Over two thirds of the opponents you fight in this game will be ones that spawned in after clearing the ones organically placed. And they’ll often spawn behind you as well. Don’t expect much variety either, as the enemies you face in the first level will be the ones you fight again and again and again through all the rest of them as well, with very little variation.
You get to choose from a variety of “bikers,” all of which are designed worse than even the cheapest 90’s shooter. They have variations in terms of speed, agility, shields and hull values, and come with a piece of forgettable fluff. To gain and use them, you have to defeat them in game. Which is confusing and only slightly difficult because their models are smaller than any enemy model.
Speaking of which; the game works purely on mesh collisions. Meaning there are no bounding boxes for you or your projectiles to identify interactions. So if you want to pick up a powerup, or activate a switch, or do damage to an opponent, you HAVE to hit the mesh itself. Something that is a bit of a trial early on, but admittedly easy enough to get used to. Except for the power ups. It is endlessly annoying that you have to
And while bosses are different enough to be mildly interesting, they’re incredibly easy to cheese to the point they may as well not exist. Especially the ones with bizarre instant-death attacks.
Even the doors will be your enemy, as they react as a toggle. As in, shooting or running into them will not only toggle them open, but also toggle them to close. So trying to shoot through or fly through small doors becomes a trial when the terrible things keep closing on you without you meaning for them to.
The levels alone are terribly designed as well, often being cramped spaces and tunnels too difficult to fit into. Even the enemy AI bounces off the walls trying to navigate them
And the AI is already brain damaged, consistenting of merely two variations; the kind that will rabidly hunt you down and fly up into your face, firing away. Or the kind that operates on a fixed pathway and will lob various projectiles at you as the blindly trundle along
And the projectiles; most of them are going to be flashing red-blue orbs that cluster your screen with even MORE real time lighting. But the real offense comes from the tracking projectiles. Some of which seem to be entities themselves, capable of following you around corners and corridors to insane and incredibly annoying degrees.
The graphics; Also bad. The texture work is abysmal, and for a game that released the same year as Unreal, it’s incredibly awful. UV maps are stretched and bunched up all over the place, and often badly misaligned. The lighting is nonsensical at best, painful to the eyes at worst with the terrible abundance of contrasting colors.
Doors often don’t look like doors, which is surprising considering secret pathways are almost obvious with the way lighting and textures interact. The placement and usage of a lot of the templates is questionable, leading to terrible overall level designs. And the differences between each level is minimal as well; they all tend to meld together and become indistinguishable from one another in terms of looks and gameplay. Your minimap is your best friend in terms of navigating through the deranged mess.
The audio: surprising, also bad. I’m not even going to talk about the music other than to simply say it was nonsensical ugly noise, and the game was infinitely better with it turned off. Sound design alone seems an afterthought more than anything, with some enemies and projectiles sounding like out of control vacuums, and some being pure silence. It makes an already half-built game feel even more devoid and empty.
Enemies also lack an alert noise audio cue, which I suppose is fitting since they seem to be watching you through walls most of the time anyways. Regardless, the missing soundscape just adds to the pile of awful design decisions.
Finally, the story. Yeah it’s trash. It barely exists. What little there is reads like an edge lords judge dredd fanfiction. Acclaim’s attempt at making a dark and gritty game has to be tongue in cheek, because anything else would be depressing to consider.
Ignore this game. It’s not worth it, not even if you’re curious how bad it is. If you want a true six degrees of freedom game, go play any of the Descent games, or Overload.
