Fast action sci-fi shooter

Descent 2 is a sci-fi shoot-em up which is very dated now although seems to have retained something of a cult status amongst some Mac users.

The graphics and gameplay are very dated but you can see why it’s quite an addictive game with a decent level of depth to the worlds and levels and a challenging and yet not impossible level of gameplay. You take control of a small spaceship with the task of rescuing hostages in a series of tunnels and burrows that are inhabited by aliens and other enemy spacecraft.

You can choose whether to control the craft by joystick, mouse or keyboard. The first thing to work out is how to thrust the spaceship forward though and for this you have to use the keyboard with the A and Z keys. You can guide the ship with the mouse and use the left button to activate the canon and the right to fire missiles. You’re confronted with a series of doors and mazes along which you have hostages in blue waving for help alongside other enemy craft determined to shoot you down.

The worlds and levels have some depth to them and you can happily spend a while just flying around exploring. However, there seems to be no real end to the game – it doesn’t seem to matter how many hostages you rescue, it goes on and on and you never seem to die either. The result is in the end, it does get a bit tedious and boring.

Descent has aged a lot but it still handles and plays well for it’s genre. The fact that it’s stuck around so long proves that whatever the graphics the gameplay and level depth are above average.

Fixed OpenGL textures under Windows and OS XAdded optional console (not really useful, yet)Improved movie playerImproved networking (especially Windows and bigendian unix)Added IPv4 multicasting mode (Thanks, Aaron Plattner!)Improved loading of Descent 1 texturesImproved loading of shareware/OEM data files

Changes

• Fixed OpenGL textures under Windows and OS XAdded optional console (not really useful, yet)Improved movie playerImproved networking (especially Windows and bigendian unix)Added IPv4 multicasting mode (Thanks, Aaron Plattner!)Improved loading of Descent 1 texturesImproved loading of shareware/OEM data files