If you liked and miss Decent, check out Overload on Steam. It’s great.
The resemblance is immediately obvious. Didn’t know this existed. Thanks.
It’s made by the original Descent devs and it genuinely slaps :)
Already bought it. It’s the Descent IV we never got 20 years ago. Dang, been a while since I thought of the dev drama surrounding these games.
Overload is VERY good I highly recommend, not even for nostalgia it is just a great game period.
Man I friggin loved Descent II. Game was so fun and immersive. I watched that opening cinematic over and over. The soundtrack was fantastic as well.
I later went and played Descent 1 as well but 2 was the one I played the most.
2 also has the thief bot which while infuriating also lead to some of the most memorable gameplay for me. Just chasing that little piece of shit to the ends of the earth and then feeling so triumphant when I finally nabbed it and got my stuff back.
I was in a computer club in High School. So we were able to play a few games in the computer lab after school. The teacher that headed it absolutely loved playing Descent, but she was also so bad at it that it was pure blind luck if she ever actually hit anyone.
Descent II has maybe the most unique soundtrack I have ever heard in a game.
It really was incredible. Especially back then when I hadn’t had much exposure yet to that style of music. The fact that it was CD quality instead of midi really helped.
I vividly remember discovering how you could just put the game disk in a regular CD player and it’d work. Kinda blew my mind lol.
I remember playing this on my Voodoo graphics card back in the day.
I always wanted to check it out again, but there are no proper discounts of this game anymore, and the price even increased to 20€ a couple of months back. Who thinks that anybody will buy Descent with DOSBox for 20€ in 2025? Might as well just use my old pirated copy on a burned CD I have somewhere.
Playing on a Pentium with 3D accelerator was a blessing and a curse. Multiplayer Descent 2 with someone who used one was wild. The game used client-side calculations that would break if your computer was fast.
Enemy homing missile trajectory was calculated per frame, so they were extremely difficult to avoid. At the same time, weapons like the gauss or plasma beam would shoot per frame, so you could kill an opponent so fast that it seemed instantanous on their end.
Nausea has never been as fun as it was back then.
Played the hell out of 1, 2, and 3, along with Freespace. Planetdescent was my home for years. Shakerheads unite!
This game holds a special place in my life. Back in the 90s we had it on the family PC and it was so awesome.
Every once in a while I play it on DOSBox. I fully recomend it. It’s an amazing game.
One of the things I’ve always remembered about Decent was when you put in cheat codes it would play a little sound effect of someone saying “cheater…”
I remember getting punished by trying to use the Descent 1 cheat codes in Descent 2.
gabbagabbahey
that was a great game
Fuck yes, Descent 2 was even better, with your small helper robot and even more cool weapons/rockets.
I played the shit out of this. I bet the controls are still hard coded in me.
Brilliant game.
Worth playing with the PS1 Descent soundtrack too for a different experience (or Descent Maximum as it was across the pond), it got me in to Type O-Negative too.
Descent was ahead of its time. Are there any modern games that are similar?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
Overload. It was made by the old devs of the original Descent.
I think there are custom maps that recreate the original Descent levels.
Adding this to my wish list!
Great game, but I could never play it for more than ten minutes at a time before getting woozy and nauseous.
Descent was one of the first games I had to play, I remember it fondly. It came bundled with my family’s first computer (along with Lemmings and Simcity 2000) so I spent a fair amount of time on it. The freedom of motion you had in Descent was impressive - albeit easy to confuse yourself with - and something I have rarely seen since.
I used to play the hell out of both 1&2, but now my old brain can no longer compute the 360 movement in a claustrophobic environment.
