Descent II

About Descent II

Descent II (1996) is Parallax Software's six-degrees-of-freedom shooter in which a pilot flies through robot-infested mines across six star systems, destroying each reactor and escaping before the meltdown.

Descent II in Depth

As in the first Descent, the player pilots a fighter in zero gravity from a first-person view, free to move in any direction and rotate on all three axes, pitch, yaw and roll. Infected robots try to destroy the ship as it navigates extrasolar underground mines. In each level the reactor must be found and blown up, then the ship must escape through the exit before the mine self-destructs; every fourth level replaces the reactor with a boss robot. There are four levels in each of six themed star systems, plus six secret levels reached through hidden teleporters, full of power-ups but impossible to save in. Levels are made of rooms linked by doors, some needing blue, yellow or red keys, and new control panels open doors, remove walls or shut off force fields when shot.

To avoid getting lost the player can fire flares, use a headlight, consult a wireframe automap and drop markers on it. The big addition is the Guide-Bot, a scouting robot that, once freed, leads the ship to a chosen objective or power-up. Hostages earn bonus points if rescued, energy stations recharge the ship and generators spawn more robots. Weapons are split into energy-hungry primaries, from pulse lasers to plasma bolts plus two rotary cannons firing shells, and secondaries such as missiles and mines dropped behind the ship, with ten new weapons in all.

Making Descent II

Parallax Software spent about a year on it, upgrading the graphics to Super VGA with support for 3D accelerator cards. The portal engine was fundamentally unchanged: levels are built from adjacent convex cubes whose shared sides act as portals, so only visible areas are drawn, which kept it practical on inexpensive PCs. Dan Wentz composed the MIDI score. Reviews were very positive, praising the multiplayer and the Guide-Bot; GameSpot wrote that if you did not like Descent at least a little, "there is something wrong with you", and Next Generation praised its SVGA graphics, FMV story scenes and new items. PC Review felt the Guide-Bot undercut the series' disorientation, and the PlayStation version received mixed reviews over its frame rate. Descent 3 followed in 1999.