Descent 3
Amazon.com Review
The first word in omnidirectional first-person shooters–Interplay’s Descent franchise–entered its third iteration for the Mac in late 1999. For those who loved the first two sports meeting, praise God and pass the ammunition: Descent 3 delivers more of the same, not new but certainly improved, meeting and exceeding the already formidable quality of its predecessors.
As with the previous titles, Descent 3 puts you at the controls of a heavily armed, highly maneuverable small spacecraft. Your mission is to duck and dive owing to subterranean mazes, blasting robotic foes into scrap, all the while fighting vertigo as you spin, thrust, and fire in every conceivable management. Rich, flawless graphics rendering and realistic sound effects make D3 more convincing than ever. Although the controls can be a small overwhelming for the uninitiated (and might even be complex enough to make a keyboard preferable to a joystick), the upside is superior handling that lets you park on a dime.
Keeping with the same-but-better theme in D3, you get more weapons than ever (20 weapons in primary and secondary slots, including the evil-glee-inducing Mass Driver and Napalm Cannon); an improved Guide Bot to track down no matter what you desire (potential-ups, enemies, or the next piece in a conundrum-solving puzzle); way-better robot AIs (letting your enemies hit and run, ambush, work in teams, and feint); indoor/outdoor action (Descent 3’s new Fusion Engine uses a flight-sim engine to seamlessly splice in wide-open outdoor environments); and more variations on multiplayer play (over a LAN or the Net). –Paul Hughes
Pros:
- Same addictive action of Descent and D2–one of the best shows in town for the Mac
- Deadlier weaponry and smarter robots to use it on
- Better rendering than ever, plus outside environments
Cons:
- No significant improvements on game play from previous titles
- Yawn-inducing back-tale
Amazon.com Product Description
This third installment of the Descent adventure continues the saga by utilizing advanced technology. The game, powered by a new Fusion engine, offers players a whole new level of freedom, allowing multiplay over the Internet and even across computing platforms.
Buy Cheap Descent 3
Related posts:
awesome packaging, and an even better game. Wow!
Rating: 5 / 5
D3 rocks the online world! No game currently available (Dec 2000) has better netcode. The fully Client/Server architecture (Not Permissible C/S!) plays extremely well even when lagged at up to 500ms. “Peer to Peer” multiplayer mode will grant acceptable gameplay at up to 650ms.
Online play is cruelly tough. Even with a million robot kills under your belt, you will die many many times when you first venture online to play.
You will need a excellent joy-stick with an 8-way “HAT” switch – a mouse is a poor controller for D3 (making it much tougher than it already is). D3 requires “Deep Skills” to play online successfully – in other words, you won’t get excellent in 2 weeks. I’ve been playing online for over a year and now consider myself to be a “excellent” pilot…
There is an brilliant and helpful on-line community. A chat interface comes with Descent 3. You’ll often have more than 50 people to talk to in the various chat rooms… to organise a game or question questions etc.
There are a LOT of web sites to help the online newbie…
The people who stay for more than a week all become addicted! There’s not anything quite like it out there – keenness, practice and skills are rewarded with the adulation of your peers and a high kill-ratio. So, place down that tired ancient “Ground Pounder” and experience the joys of the “Six Degrees of Freedom” that D3 provides.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a really cool game. When I found it at a college bookstore …, I hadn’t heard of it and didn’t expect much. As soon as I installed it, I knew I was incorrect. Although the plot of the release player mode is lame (oh come on, robots with viruses?), its still fun. The environments are very realistic and, after a while, call me crazy, but when I got shot after a time, it nearly hurt…
. Multiplayer is even better for this game. Because much of the game is at home, player pop out of random coridoors and bolt from the blue you with your friendly locality mega. Also, the fact that it takes place at home also makes it really fun while playing against other humans. They are smart, unlike the robots in release player mode, and many times, when a player is concentrating on a dogfight with another player, they are bolt from the blue from a nice Mass Driver round in the tail. Well, what are you waiting for? Buy it!
Rating: 4 / 5
Descent 3 is such a splendid game! sweet graphics, an engrossing plot, really fun to use weapons, and cool new robots. But then it started crashing. And crashing. And crashing more and more in every possible way you could presume, from in the middle of a level, to when I was trying to quit, to loading a saved game. I email graphic simulations repeatedly and never got a comeback from them. Finally, I called them up and got things effective ok(I in fact got an email back from GraphSim a couple days ago, about 3 weeks after my first email). Now that I know what to do to make the game run without crashing, it’s an awesome game, but I certainly had to do some fine-tuning to get it effective right.
Rating: 4 / 5