If Descent met Torchlightĭeveloper Sigtrap Games has been promoting Sublevel Zero for more than a year, calling it 'a roguelike 6-degree-of-freedom shooter.' For folks who have been on the PC gaming side of things for twenty years, those are a magical series of words-'6 degrees of freedom,' of course, is almost always code for 'this is a game that’s like Descent.' And it is.
And after loading it up… it’s 1995 all over again. I ask for an early access key to Sublevel Zero. Up and down no longer have any meaning to me. I pay $15 for the registered version of Kali, an IPX emulator that lets you play Descent over the Internet with up to seven other players. My buddy Matt and I spend practically every evening with our computers connected via 9600bps modems, chasing each other through the mines in Descent’s head-to-head multiplayer. The game’s premise is ' Doom but in a spaceship.' I am hooked. I bring home a shareware demo of a game called Descent.
