Descent 3

Discount Price: $5.96

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

a good series gone bad [Posted on 2001-07-17]
When I bought This game I expected a few things. 1) I expected more wepons that I can destroy robots with 2)I expected new levals which I could explore 3) I expected more mindless destruction 4) I expected better graphics. 5) I needed to know what happened to material defender ( the guy you play as in all the descent series)

Decent 2 had all these things I wanted. I personally think that was one of the best games out there. When I bought Descent 3 I expected a improved Decent 2. I was wrong. You do get almost all the things I expect in a sequal but you get something else that I didn't want or suspect. Now it wasn't go into a mind destroy all the robots blow up the mind and get out of there in t-30 seconds you now had to accomplish objectives and there was no center of the mind or boss robots there were objectives you had to complete. That took out some of the mindless destruction part of the series which in my opinion was the best part. One more thing this game is hard I'm stuck on leval 2. This game in my opinion is a disapointment to the series. Go buy descent 2 instead instead.

This is the BEST GAME EVER! [Posted on 2003-01-01]
Descent 3 has a great plot. You work for a futuristic space defender organization. Your job is to foil the plans of the evil Samuel Dravis, the president of the Post Terran Mining Corporation(PTMC). The game has the best graphics I have ever seen in a game. With a wide variety of weapons to use, robots to destroy, and mysterious puzzles to solve, you can have the time of your life. I highly suggest you get this game.

Tifus

Superb PC Game [Posted on 2003-01-07]
Back in 1999, the third and most likely final chapter of the Descent series released. It was praised and lauded by game reviewers and magazines worldwide. However, due to Interplay's bungled marketing, the game never got the player recognition it deserved. Tragically, it meant the end for the series.

I think it speaks volumes about a game when I can look at it now, three years later, and see what I see. People are still building new levels for it, multiplayer is still fairly popular, and the community is still strong. The DescentBB and Planet Descent are great places to start, so look them up when you get the chance.

Anyhow, regarding the game itself. The hallmark of the Descent series is its gameplay that concerns all three axes of movement, unlike other FPS games like Quake or Unreal that largely limit your movement to the ground. In Descent, you can fly wherever you want to, stop and turn on a dime, and move freely. Descent 3 continues this with its new game engine, which actually consists of two engines - one for rendering indoor areas and the other for rendering outdoor areas with terrain.

Continuing where Descent 2 left off, the game reprises your role as the Material Defender, a mercenary hired by the Post-Terran Minerals Corporation sent to rid their intergalactic mining installations of worker robots gone amuck. As fate would have it, rather than pay you for your efforts, your boss at the PTMC named Dravis decided to sabotage your ship instead. Fortunately, before reaching certain doom by hurtling towards the sun, you are rescued by a team of researchers calling themselves Red Acropolis. It seems they know about Dravis' sabotage and that he was ultimately behind the rogue robot activity in the first place. As the only pilot with enough guts to tackle the situation, it is your duty to gather the evidence to incriminate Dravis.

Of course, this is just the intro movie. The rest of the single-player campaign features 15 gigantic levels. And I do emphasize gigantic - these behemoths are many times the size of the old Descent levels and yet still only load once at the beginning. Inhabiting them, naturally, are a varied assortment of robots arranged in various classes - security drones, miners, and even robots that sweep the floor. These are your obstacles on the way to completing your mission objectives. Unlike the first two games, which were built around gathering keys, destroying a Reactor, then escaping the mine, Descent 3 has objectives for each level that must be accomplished. These include escorting important ships, going on recon missions, and in an ironic nod to the old games, defending the Reactors from destruction.

To carry these out, you find all sorts of neat weapons. There are ten different primary weapons and ten secondary weapons. Primaries include your basic Laser Cannon, chaingun-like Vauss Cannon, railgun-like Mass Driver, searing Napalm Cannon, and shield sucking Omega Cannon. The secondaries are equally diverse and include such hits as the Napalm Missile that bursts into flame, the Frag Missile that bursts into a thousand shards, and the awesome gravity-altering Black Shark Missile that sucks your enemies into a black hole.

Multiplayer is fantastic. New multiplayer levels are always coming out and the action never grows old. Descent 3 comes with many gameplay modes for multiplayer. Anarchy is your traditional deathmatch, and as you might expect Team Anarchy is also present. Capture the Flag is also represented, and built more like other games in this regard as opposed to the bizarre interpretation of it in Descent 2. One of the more intriguing modes is Entropy, a team game where you must collect viruses and infect the bases of the opposing team.

Being that this game will be four years old this year, it is becoming very hard to find it. But, should you come across it, I would strongly recommend a purchase. This is one of the finest PC games ever designed. Just because players didn't acknowledge it back in 1999 doesn't mean you have to. A fantastic game, a fantastic community, and years of playability. Who could ask for anything more?

True 3D [Posted on 2003-08-05]
Even after 5 years Descent 3 still provides the most unique gameplay of all FPS. Admittedly it has a very steep learning curve to get a grip on the true 360deg environment (move on 4 axis at the same time..) but it's worth the work ! Besides the excellent and huge single player levels, D3 features a wide bunch of multi player modes like CTF, Entrophy, Hyper Anachy etc.
You can find a ton of add-on's at planetdescent.com and there's an online community regulary playing league games. Beware tho, you should have mastered D3 on insane level before going online, else you'll get shot up :^)

Newer is not always better [Posted on 2006-01-13]
Before I bought this game, I followed the progress of its development via the World Wide Web. The only reason I was so excited to get it was because I expected it to be better than Descent II. I expected Descent 3 to have all of the D2 weapons and more. I remember being disappointed when I read the manual that weapons such as the Phoenix Cannon and Helix Cannon were excluded. On top of that, only a few primary weapons (out of ten total) are actually any good, which means the descriptions of the weapons in the pilot's manual are very misleading.

The system requirements were way too high. I remember buying a video card for this game, and I couldn't even play level 5 because it was too choppy. And nobody's computer was good enough to play certain multiplayer levels.

The single-player was overcomplicated. Instead of "get blue key, get yellow key, get red key, destroy the reactor or boss," you have to complete these specific objectives, and if you don't, you fail the mission and can't continue until you do. I enjoyed the missions, but that's because I like action games a lot. Outrage tried way too hard to make the single-player like a tactical action game. In a shooting game, complicated objectives just don't fly. It just doesn't seem action-packed.

The music, and almost all of the sounds were different. I liked the music, but that's because I like techno. The music and sounds were just so inconsistent with Descent I and II. It's a common misconception among Descent players that Descent 3 failed because of lack of marketing. But there was just too much competition from games like Half-Life; so D3 fell by the wayside. There was a great lack of Descent 3 players online, which continually declined. So most players became over-confident and over-competitive, worrying too much about their rank and statistics and heckling the weaker players, constantly reminding them of their lack of skill, day in and day out.

For three years I struggled with Descent 3 (Yes I said three years). I just couldn't get the concept of how to move with whatever controller I was using. Self-help Web sites for Descent didn't help, because this game is not Descent. And the changes Outrage made to the ship physics and controls didn't make it any easier. The single-player only lasted a month, and that's because I didn't play it all day. There were only 15 levels, and while they were much bigger (that's another thing, D3 has super-huge levels), each super-huge level took the same amount of time to complete as any D1/D2 level. The size of the levels made a lot of the weapons ineffective too.

Once I got the hang of the multiplayer, then it was O.K., which is why I gave this game the rating I gave it. I think the only reasons I played as long as I did were because I thought it was going to be like Descent II, and I wanted to become the best player. Both of those things never happened. For 3 years I only had a 33% efficiency. Never made it past the first rank, when the ranks still existed. I didn't even make the list on PXO. Not to mention that this game is full of bugs. Especially if you have a modern computer. I'd say playing Descent 3 multiplayer was one of the worst experiences of my life. I'd say, if you like action games and single-player games, pick it up, it's good for a few thrills...plus it's only like $1 now. But if you don't have the patience for being chain-killed in multiplayer, and can't stand playing the same levels over and over, then this game is not for you.

Click here for more details and discount information...