I sadly missed out on the original Descent back in the day, but it looks like I’m in luck, because the original creators of the six degrees of freedom shooter are building a spiritual successor.
The game’s promising a 15-level campaign and solid weapon and enemy variety, and they’re hoping to launch on PC and consoles early in 2017. Assuming they meet their $300,000 funding goal, of course.
While Kickstarter’s produced its share of bad stories, Overload’s being produced by a group of industry veterans who have already built a solid-looking alpha. Naturally, anything can happen, making games is hard, et cetera, but I’m pretty confident they can deliver a solid game.
Of course, you shouldn’t get it confused with Descent: Underground, the also-Kickstarted Descent prequel made by a surely talented team of developers who are nonetheless not the people who originally made Descent. Underground just barely hit its $600,000 last year, and is currently available on Steam Early Access, where it seems like people are enjoying it.
Some messy contract disputes pulled the original Descent games from Steam and Gog.com last year, so the only way to legally get your 6 degrees of freedom on will be either Underground or Overload for the foreseeable future.