Descenders Reviews

Descenders is a game where you're riding a bike downhill as fast as possible while completing optional objectives to regain your health. Between courses, there are some perks offered in order to increase your likelihood of winning the run. While the game is fun enough for a couple of hours, Descenders very quickly becomes a procedurally generated slog. The runs never feel different from each other, and each course is more or less the same, just with varying degrees of slopes/curves on the track. Unfortunately, due to the procedurally generated nature of the game, it lacks any real charm at all. After beating a run for the first time, I have not felt any desire to play more, it's just not as fun as it could be.

its pretty good for mtb tricks and a lot of customization

Similar to car racing this shit is so much more difficult than doing it irl.

its fun if your bored and if you just want to vibe with friends and listen to music, could also be used as a stress relief topic if possible or smt idk

A simple concept that is fleshed out and fun. A good example of how there is still a place for sport/racing games without all of the open world and live service stuff.

controls are broken out of the box and cannot be rebound. game doesn't recognize inputs and some buttons on the controller do not exist to the game.

Very satisfying. It's great that you can do so many tricks, and even after 100 hours of gameplay, there are still new mechanics to learn. Very good flow, and an endless number of maps thanks to the built-in mod search engine. Compared to Riders Republic, the graphics in Descendants are worse, but the driving experience is much more enjoyable. For example, you can control the force of your takeoff using a joystick instead of buttons.

best bike game, easy to get into, hard to master. lots of challenges.

I mean, it's a fun game. It might be actually great once I finally learn how to gamepad. It doesn't say anywhere that it was made for a controller. Keyboard controls are confusing as heck and can't provide full control over the bike. The game just starts off with feeding you gamepad controls, despite having zero gamepads connected, and doesn't give access to options to look up keyboard controls until you're out of the tutorial. Limited lives + zero gamepad skills/ or nonsense of the keyboard layout they have = not a good time. Maybe I'll learn. I did consider refunding the game, but eh... it's fun enough. And No More Robots is something worth supporting.

I got this for like $5 but honestly it's worth the $20. It's a really simple game about riding a bike down randomly generated hills and hitting sick jumps. The bike feels good to control and it's fun to go fast and jump high. It's biggest problem is it's own need to give itself a 'rougelike' framing causing it to disincentivize the most fun ways to play the game. At it's best, it's close to something like the Trackmania games, but what if Trackmania had a really strict health system and if you failed a jump like 4 times you couldn't play that track ever again? Bad idea right? Yeah, it is here too. Whenever the game presents a fun track or jump you're incentivized to slam your breaks and carefully avoid going to high or having too much fun at the risk of being punished. It's stupid. Other big complaint is that they've added a feature where landing 'hard' seems to roll an actual dice roll to determine if you instantly crash or not. This is odd considering the game isn't a simulation in any sense and is definitely more an arcadey action game. It's just another way the game keeps you from having as much fun as you want by offering high speed and insane jumps but slapping you on the hand at random for DARING to go fast off that big jump. I still had a good time hitting the end of the first campaign and was really pleased to find a whole second campaign waiting, plus a ton of open world and Trials-like maps to bike through as well. It's also got randomized cosmetic unlocks that act as a fun carrot on a stick if that's something that appeals to you. I'd recommend it, but I'd also recommend the devs let me enjoy the fun game without scolding me for having too much fun. EDIT: I've played another 38 hours and I still think hard landings are too harsh but MAN I really love this game actually. It's great.