Descent II is a true testament to the remarkable talent of the developers at Parallax Software. The game is simply incredible, and remains my all-time favorite MS-DOS game. Descent and Descent 2 had, at the time, the best dynamic lighting/shading ever seen at a time when "programmable shaders" were entirely done in software. Parallax fundamentally understood lighting concepts well before the rest of the gaming industry did. Until Quake, the Descent series remained the only series to have true 3D environments (with correct perspective projection so that the scene does not 'stretch' when camera looks up/down) and 3D-rendered enemies. This was something that, in the mid-1990s, we were not used to as gamers, and it absolutely blew us away. Doom, Doom 2 and Duke Nukem 3D were awesome, but they all used animated sprites for enemies and objects. - Controls are entirely customizable (I use the well-known WASD combination for sliding and circling, then R, F, Q, and E for vertical and rolling movements,) - A mouse works well, but you may need to pick up your mouse often -- for this reason, a joystick works best (although it comes at the expense of aiming precision) - If you have never played before, start in "trainee" or "rookie" skill. - Best of all, since Parallax Software released the game's source code, both games (Descent and Descent 2) have an enormous fan community. Take a look at the D2X-XL project. Suggestion for GOG: If you can, try to obtain the necessary rights in order to include the Descent 2: Vertigo Series expansion (came as a separate CD-ROM with "Descent 2: The Infinite Abyss") with the game, or as a separate add-on we can buy. As of now, I still have to install that from my original Vertigo CD-ROM separately via DOSBox. I can confirm that the Vertigo add-on installs correctly and works great with the GOG version of D2. This adds 23 new missions, several multiplayer maps, and several new robots and bosses.
This one is quite possibly one of the best Sci-Fi shooters ever. It has an incrediby compelling single player campaign that really keeps you wondering what will happen next. I would recommend also buying Freespace 1 & playing it all the way through first, though, in order to become more familiar with the plot line. I also have the original CD, so I found it nice when GOG was offering a download that wouldn't require a CD. Be advised; however, that the GOG version was somewhat modified from the original CD version in that there is no longer a basic setup utility (i.e.; there is no utility to allow you to set up screen resolutions, choose between OpenGL or Direct3D, etc). Because of this, it doesn't run very well on my aging Athlon XP 3200+ PC with 2 GB of memory and a 512 MB AGP GeForce 7950 GT. At the time of the original CD-ROM title release, I was running this with a much older 500 MHz K6-2 desktop and a GeForce2 card, and it ran far better. Either way, I must give this five stars--for many of you with much newer computers, this game should run flawlessly. I just need to upgrade.
