Descent is a first-person shooter that plays kind of like a simplified flight simulator, and it's simply a blast to play. You are an employee at the Post-Terran Minerals Corporation (PTMC), a leader in the mining industry that uses robots to dig up minerals on all 9 planets. Unfortunately, the robots are being controlled by some kind of hacker (presumably an evil alien race) bent on using the robots to destroy the planet Earth. PTMC's CEO calls you in for a mission briefing, and you simply do not want to do this job. What job? You're piloting a heavily modified Pyro-GX to destroy the mining robots.
While your ship can only take a shot or two before blowing up, it has shields that allow it to take a lot of damage. Picking up a shield boost will increase your shields by 15%, very similar to med-kits in traditional first-person shooters. You'll start the game with 100% shields, and the maximum is 200% (even the shield boosts will get your shields over 100%!) Considering that the AI in this game is very smart -- as you progress in the game, the robots will observe your playing strategies and start using them themselves -- these shields prove to be very helpful. You have awesome weapons at your disposal, all that use an energy supply (except for the Vulcan Cannon, an extremely accurate weapon that spits out shotgun shells, which uses its own shotgun shells) that starts at 100% and, like your shields, can go up to 200%. Energy boosts increase your energy by 15% up to 200%, just like the shield boosts. You start out with a laser gun and some concussion missiles, and progress to better weapons like a speadfire cannon, homing missiles, and proximity bombs. The rest I'll leave to you to find out.
Unlike traditional flight simulation games, the controls in Descent are relatively simple. You can manually accelerate and reverse your ship, or turn "cruise control" on. As in traditional first-person shooters, you can also slide left and right. Your ship is so well-built as to even slide "up" and "down"! You can also roll to the left and right. And, of course, you can rotate your ship in all directions (what would the game be without being able to rotate?) Using the mouse and the usual WASD control scheme works fine.
Even today, Descent's graphics are amazing. As in Quake, Descent uses true-3D to draw its graphics. With the use of special command line parameters, you can even increase the resolution up to 640x480, but you need a VESA-compatible video card to do that. Most computers manufactured in Descent's day (1995), even the fastest ones, couldn't handle the 640x480 mode, but if you have the horsepower (most computers in the late 90's do) then it's well worth it. The music is also very well done, especially the tune in the sound setup program, which I now have stuck in my head.
I couldn't find anything wrong with the game, at least if you have a computer that's capable of running it. Descent is a DOS-based game, and in Windows XP, the game acts like it's on speed and the sound effects don't work very well. Then again, Descent was never designed to run on that type of computer.
The action is non-stop, the explosions are constant, the graphics are state-of-the-art, the music is catchy, and the controls are slick. What more could you want? A definite 10 / 10 to this one!