Descenders Next offers multiple biomes, each with different nodes and unique conditions. Upon unlocking new nodes, you can partake in procedurally generated runs like the original (if a unique race isn’t already present). Multiplayer is also introduced, and you can unlock new gear upon accruing points.

For more details on Descenders Next, check out our feature. Early access currently offers four biomes, two sports, and three teams. It will continue for two years, during which RageSquid will add more environments, modding support, new multiplayer modes, additional sports, and many more customization options. Best of all, the price won’t change when it exits early access. Stay tuned for updates in the meantime.

New Snowboard/Mountainboard Controls

The biggest departure is by far the omission of mountain bikes in favor of snowboards and mountain boards. Yes, that’s right. Our beloved bike controls from Descenders are gone, forcing us to learn completely new board physics. The board physics aren’t too simlike to feel overwhelming though, feeling more like Rider’s Republic than a snow version of Session where every limb is independently controlled. Mountainboarding is similar to snowboarding, except you fit some oversized wheels on a smaller board and trust that you won’t die going down rugged dirt terrain. Riding down on these wheeled boards makes it more difficult to find momentum, providing a skillful challenge where gaining speed and timing jumps is crucial to basic success. Both of the boarding styles feel more loose than the bikes of the previous games, accommodating for the wider range of tricks and larger surface area of boards.

Wide Array of Board Tricks

Perhaps the most excited aspect of the new extreme sports included here are the slew of tricks that come with them. Snowboarding has some of the most varied tricks out of any extreme sport, and Descenders Next incorporates a wide array of that toolkit. Grinding rails and fallen trees is now possible, opening up the kind of functional obstacles on trails tenfold. And then there’s all the well known grab tricks, from melons to rocket airs and everything in between; it’ll be fun to see the top player combos and what crazy lines people come up with.

New Biomes

One of the things that made the first Descenders so special was the infinite replayability thanks to proceduaral generation. No two runs felt the same. Descenders Next opens up the floodgates to what’s possible with the addition of snowy mountain passes. The inclusion of rails is just one exciting new obstacle to do tricks on, but the snowy mountain biome also includes halfpipes and breathtaking ramps. Meanwhile, on the mountainboard side of things, trails feel almost like a dirt bike obstacle course, more in line with the first Descenders game. If you feel the need to switch up the scenery, the two styles, snowboarding and mountain, can be played at any time via the main menu.

Branching Node Structure Combining Career and Bike Park from the First Game

Descenders Next streamlines the modes of the first game, incorporating Career mode and Bike Parks into one seamless experience. Instead of selecting bike parks individually or just free roaming around in the lobby park, parks now function as checkpoints; a kind of safe zone reward after completing a harrowing series of uncharted randomly generated trails. The main thing you’re progressing towards are the boss levels in each area. These bosses require a multitude of uncharted trails, parks, and nodes to reach. Oh, and they’re basically boss in name only, there’s no actual opponent to fight, it’s just a way of saying the level is more challenging than what came before.

Procedurally Generated Uncharted Trails

The game calls these procedurally generated levels ‘offpiste trails’. This is where the roguelike challenge kicks in. You have a set amount of lives and If you bail too much or fail to clear a course within the time limit, you’re booted all the way back to the last safe zone losing valuable progress. What makes this gameplay loop so rewarding and smooth is the instantaneous respawning after a fail state. We’ve only seen the easiest offpiste trails so far in the demo, so it’ll be interesting to see how challenging it becomes to reach a safe zone in later stages of the game.

Race and Slopestyle Tracks

Of course, parks aren’t the only safe zone; Race and Slopestyle tracks also allow you to bank your progress, and better yet, fast travel between each safe zone node. Contrasting the offpiste trails, these challenge tracks are hand-made routes challenging players beat the bronze, silver, or gold medal times in Race or nail the specific tricks within Slopestyle.

New Hand-Made Parks

One of the most beloved aspects of the first Descenders were the creative parks filled with obstacles and stuff to do tricks off. The Descender’s Next demo allows players to explore the Rabbit Hill snowboard park and the Farmer’s Hill mountainboard park, but many more unique parks will become available as more safe zone nodes are unlocked through the full game. Parks act as a fun chill sandbox to brush up on skills alone or with friends. There’s also a bit of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater DNA here with the checklist of challenges to conquer in each park.

New Scavenger Hunt Challenges

Tapping into that THPS DNA even further are hidden collectables to find. Each park has a slew of secrets to locate if you are to 100% the objective checklist. So far, it seems like parks have a set of five Descent tokens and an ultra hidden object like the secret tapes in THPS demanding that players comb every inch of the environment.

Shops Replace Drops

Shop nodes replace the RNG item drops from the first game. Now, instead of having to wait all the way to the end of a boss track, you can just bank your earned rep on the gear of your choice at shops.

Additional Customization Options

The range of gear you purchase from shops has been expanded to include sets with new rarity bonuses. Additionally, the seven gear types from the first game have been expanded to 10 broad categories: headwear, shirts, outerwear, gloves, pants, footwear, accessories, snowboard/mountainboard, trucks, bindings, and tires. This is in addition to the absolutely wacky icons that you can apply to your character, which can range from whoopie cushions to, as bizarre as it sounds, trains.

Map Now Has Collection Tracking

In addition to the revamped UI, which I may add, looks like generic Ubisoft menus, the map has added icons to keep track of your progress. Trophies and medals have tracking icons and can be obtained by ranking in the various races and slopestyle tracks. The completionist in me likes the new map discovery tracker, which encourage likeminded players to unlock every node on a map. I genuinely favor the first game’s minimalistic UI, but that map didn’t have any of these progress indicators, so the addition is welcome.

Reputation System Rewards You For Everything You Do

Taking a cue out of Forza Horizon’s playbook, Descenders Next rewards you for just about every single action you do in the game. Fail to hold that rocket air? No problem, you get rep just for tapping it. Sloppy downhill boarding even rewards you with skid points for when you narrowly miss hitting trees. I kinda wish performing especially ludicrous bails rewarded some rep points as well, but there needs to be a limit somewhere, right?

Video Editing Tools to Showcase Stylish Runs

Thankfully, you can still record those crazy bails with the overhauled replay editor. A host of new camera angles and advanced editing options allow you to fine-tune legendary downhill sessions to you’re liking. Freecam returns with new features like auto focus and movement interpolation. My favorite new addition is the time of day customization. The position of the sun can be controlled and players can set the lighting to match morning, noon, evening, and night cycles.

Soundtrack by Electronic Label Monstercat

If you’ve played any live service games in the past decade, odds are high you’ve heard some of Monstercat’s music. Monstercat is a music aggregator, technically a record label, with artists like DJ Marshmallow and Pegboard Nerds under them. They’ve done soundtracks for Fortnite, Beat Saber, and Rocket League, so there’s no doubt Descenders Next will be filled to the brim with quality EDM.

Multiplayer

We have yet to test out the multiplayer offerings of Descenders Next, but the prospect of “multiplayer-huge biomes” has us excited. Like the first game, players can join up with a squad in multiplayer matchmaking or through a friend’s lobby and tackle the game’s challenges together. The parks act as free roam lobbies as well, providing opportunities to chat and join others’ sessions. We have yet to see if there’s going to be competitive modes or not. Unfortunately for PlayStation or Switch users, there’s a wait, as Descenders Next launches for PC and Xbox Series X/S exclusively on April 9^th.

Microsoft are pushing hard on the Xbox Game Pass front, with the service becoming central to their strategy going forward – especially where their ever-growing portfolio of first party studios is concerned. And while there have been a few outlying voices that have questioned the validity of its business model for other developers and publishers, there has been evidence time and again that has suggested that being on Game Pass actually boosts games’ actual sales, while the visibility it gives to smaller indie devs is also a huge bonus.

One such indie dev who has benefited greatly from their game being on Game Pass is Mike Rose of No More Robots, whose title Descenders seems to have seen a huge boost in sales because of the visibility being in the Game Pass catalog has given it.

“Since Descenders came out on Game Pass, the thing I did not realise would happen — because you’d assume that you put something on Game Pass and sales tank, right?” Rose said while speaking with GamesIndustry. “I had assumed that: why would anyone buy the game when they can literally see it on Game Pass?

“We were like, should we do this Game Pass thing? But we did it, and 1.0 came out, and I think it the launch was about three times as big as the Steam Early Access launch… You could say it was putting the multiplayer in, or it was not being Early Access any more, so more people bought it. But the biggest surprise for me was Game Pass.”

The extent to which Descender’s actual sales on Xbox One have been helped by being on Game Pass is, in fact, quite impressive. According to to Rose, Xbox sales for the game have quadrupled thanks to being in the service’s ever-growing catalog.

“Being on Game Pass means that you basically have constant featuring on Xbox,” he said. “Your game is on the dashboard all the time… People are seeing our game every day. And because of that, during launch month, our Xbox sales — we didn’t do any discounts on it or anything — quadrupled, and have now settled to about three times as much as before. It’s essentially an advert; a straight up advert.”

Microsoft’s insistence that the plain and simple visibility of being on Game Pass would boost actual game sales was something that drew a healthy amount of skepticism in the service’s earlier days, but as time has gone on, it seems like we’ve seen quite a lot of evidence that it’s actually true. Indie devs especially have benefited from it greatly, and third party publishers have also bee hopping onboard more willingly. If Microsoft can keep Game Pass moving in the direction that it has been moving since it went live, I wager it’ll be a massive winner for them in the coming years.