Descenders is a favourite new Steam sale acquisition

Say what you like about Steam sales devaluing the hard work that developers put in to their games and encouraging a culture of obnoxious people who genuinely think there is a hard ratio of price to hours of gameplay… they’re a great opportunity to pick up some things that you’ve been considering for ages, but somehow never got around to. This time around, I finally got around to nabbing Descenders. And it’s fabulous.

Descenders describes itself as “extreme procedural freeriding”, and while that’s a rather dry description, it’s accurate. What we actually have here is a somewhat arcadey-feeling mountain biking game, in which the main game features procedurally generated tracks and a gameplay structure somewhat akin to roguelike card battlers. But the nice thing is that there’s a lot more to it than that, too.

Descenders

Let’s talk about that main game mode — or the career mode, as the game calls it — first. While the term “career” might suggest a long, ongoing campaign, what we actually have here is a game split into discrete, self-contained sessions, making Descenders ideal for a quick play when you just want to enjoy something relatively short-form.

A single career session challenges you to make it through four areas: the highlands, the forest, the canyons and the peaks. Each of these features a node-based map, with each node on the map representing a single procedurally generated track to challenge. Each track is rated according to its steepness, prevalence of curves and frequency of stunt opportunities, and given a descriptive name according to this — a track with a shallow slope, few stunts but lots of curves would be a “Mellow Curvy Race”, for example.

Each track you take on comes with a bonus objective which is optional, but if you complete it you get an extra point of health when you cross the finish line. Health is important because in career mode, you can only crash a certain number of times before your whole session is over and you have to start again from the beginning of the highlands; most crashes take a single point of health, but particularly hard bails will take two instead.

Descenders

Your aim in each of the four areas is to work your way across the map towards a “boss” map. Completing a particularly challenging stunt known as a “boss jump” on this map will allow you to proceed to the next area. These boss jumps are always the same, though the run-up to them will be different each time. Landing them is challenging in itself, but if you can complete some bonus objectives while successfully beating them, you can unlock shortcuts that allow you to start a new career mode run in one of the later areas.

Along the way, there are plenty of modifiers to keep things interesting. Some stages force you to play in first-person mode, for example, which is more challenging but which rewards you with more reputation points. Others feature a medic camp, which reward you with an extra point of health simply for completing the track. Others still might be danger zones, where you take double damage on bailing, but earn more points. You can also unlock “crew members” for your run, which allow you to choose various modifiers that apply for the rest of your session.

Reputation is your main measure of long-term success in Descenders, though once you’re able to reliably clear the career mode it becomes all about the “flow” rather than your total reputation score. Flow is a measure of how much reputation you earn per minute, and the online leaderboard rankings for career mode are based on flow rather than total reputation — a sensible decision, since the structure of the game means that you can deliberately take a convoluted route across each area map in order to score as many points as possible.

Descenders

As you continue to play, you’ll unlock new cosmetic parts for your rider and bike. These don’t have any effect on handling, but allow you to customise your character to your liking. And, since the game features a subtle implementation of online multiplayer, where you’ll just happen to see other riders tackling the same course as you without being able to interfere with one another, it’s fun to feel like you can express yourself through something other than your username.

If you want a break from the career mode, Descenders also comes with a variety of “bike parks” to challenge. These are pre-designed courses where the challenge is simply to make it to the finish line. You have unlimited health and time doesn’t matter — though it does keep track of how long it takes you to clear if you do want to track your own improvement over time.

Most of the bike park maps are absolutely enormous and have quite a pleasingly open world feel about them, with multiple routes to take and numerous ways to tackle the challenge before you. There’s also a huge variety of different types of bike park, ranging from floating Wipeout-style courses filled with rubber things just waiting to knock you into the water to terrifying downhill runs and even more built-up areas rather than the natural environments seen in the main game.

Descenders

Descenders is an absolute ton of fun because it handles so nicely. The bike controls are responsive and easy to understand, and the game is flexible enough to cater to multiple play styles, whether you’re in the mood for straightforward racing or some exciting stunt-based challenges. There are a few things you’ll need to get used to — such as the need to “counter-pump” with the right analogue stick to absorb the shock of a particularly large jump — but on the whole the game is highly intuitive and very enjoyable.

Not that failure isn’t enjoyable in Descenders too, mind; in the tradition of the greatest extreme sports games of the past, Descenders features some delightfully exaggerated physics for its crashes, making for some absolutely hilarious (and extremely painful-looking) bails if you happen to mess things up.

This being a video game, what would be a horrifying and life-threatening crash in reality becomes slapstick comedy, with ragdoll bodies rolling down mountains and bikes sailing off over the horizon. The wonderful voice acting for your rider — available in both male- and female-coded variants — really adds to this feeling, too; there’s nothing quite like hitting a jump a bit too fast and hearing your rider going “Whoa, whoa, WHOA!!” before catapulting themselves head-first into a cliff face upon landing, then just lying there groaning like they have a particularly bad hangover.

And with the game’s subtle multiplayer component, all of this is, of course, twice as amusing if you happen to witness it happening to someone else right in front of you.

Descenders

Descenders is presented well, with some thoroughly pleasant-looking environments to explore and the freedom to go off-road and explore them if you see fit. The game is convincingly speedy, somehow managing to make going 40 km/h infinitely more terrifying than going more than ten times that speed in a game like F-Zero.

The music is absolutely terrible, but even if it wasn’t I’d recommend turning it off anyway, since the sound effects and ambience are absolutely lovely. Similar to Megagon Industries’ excellent Lonely Mountains: Downhill, Descenders works hard to create a convincing sense of a “virtual outdoors” experience. The wind blows, the birds sing, the leaves on the trees rustle — if you don’t fancy actually going outside in the obscene summer heat, this is almost as good in terms of overall ambience!

Descenders is an absolute delight that I can highly recommend to anyone in the mood for a good, silly, arcade-style racer with a significant but optional extreme sports stunt element. It’s a game with potentially limitless replayability, yet one which doesn’t make unreasonable demands of your time; it’s the perfect thing to have on the back-burner when you’re in the mood to just play something which excites and thrills, but which doesn’t demand commitment or too much brainpower.

Descenders

Although the Steam sale has passed at the time of writing, the game is absolutely worth its £19.49 asking price on PC — and physical versions are available for PS4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One, too. It’s also available on Game Pass. I’ll see you in the highlands!

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Pete Davison
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