Pre-order Descent: Underground

It was a little more than 20 years ago when the original Descent blasted onto screens everywhere and made many players familiar with the concept of "six degrees of freedom." For a lot of people, it was perspective-spinning revelation.

The game played like part flight-simulation, part first-person action shooter, and you were charged with moving your ship through an elaborate maze of tunnels, fighting cabals of enemy machines bent on your destruction. The original spawned two more sequels, with Descent III appearing in 1999.

Following a colorful history that includes a Kickstarter campaign from developer Descendant Studios and a well-received dalliance on Steam in 2015, we got to see the upcoming and newly reimagined Descent: Underground during publisher Little Orbit's demo at E3 2018.

The story is set as a prequel to the original trilogy, where Earth is perilously low on resources and you are one of the pilots tasked with finding more of them. Of course, your journey within the asteroid belt mines involves encountering hordes of robots or, in the case of multiplayer, other pilots. One aspect Little Orbit also wanted to emphasize during its demo was that it's assembling an epic, "hand-crafted" single-player experience, complete with voice-over acting and larger-scale boss battles.

Since it's still early, I didn't get to experience all that. However, I did get to take a ship from one of the four classes for a spin, hoping not to die in front of everyone and armed only with the sound advice of "shoot things." I can only assume there were people who fared worse than I would. You can tailor the look of your ship through a simple customization system.

I only played the first Descent in passing all those years ago, but it only took a few minutes to get used to the "full freedom" style of movement that serves as the series' signature. I was able to not only look in every direction like a first-person shooter, but also move my ship, turn, ascend and descend to any plane or point on the screen with a combination of shoulder and face buttons. I eventually ran into some flying enemy robots, and I was able to shoot them down with a combination of blasters, missiles and some maneuvering behind the mine's columns.

There were some very light puzzle elements in my demo, where I had to zoom around the tunnels to find the correct keys to open color-coded doors. This is one of the times when the freedom of movement worked against my lack of natural directional talent, but that's not really going to be on the game. I just have to be more aware. Visually, the Unreal 4 engine has given this Descent some very good aesthetic bones to build around. Ship combat looked solid, and I enjoyed the dark, techno vistas of the labyrinthine tunnels as well as the design of some of the robots I found, especially a really large, multifaceted one at the end of my demo.

Other additional notes about Descent include a variety of multiplayer modes, where you'll either face off against other pilots or team up. If you go solo, the game difficulty and number of enemies will adjust accordingly. There's also going to be VR support.

It's also a treat when a classic gets remade and reborn into the modern era, with one of the most popular reboots being Doom. While the original Descent reached its own critical heights, there's an entire gaming generation out there that doesn't know its history. Perhaps this newest chapter will give them an idea. We'll find out when Descent: Underground arrives later this year.