Continuing the story of Conrad the engineer on board the Leopold and his quest to eradicate the aliens, the game starts with the ship still in dire straights and on an imminent collision course with an ice planet. Its now Conrads last chance to wipe out the alien menace thats infesting the ship and escape with his hide intact.

Not much has changed between the various games and its only the last level where Descent lives up to its expectations and offers something different than what has preceded before it. In Descent they have included a few new monsters and weapons, and have reduced the amount of meaningless cut scenes and have fixed a problem with the melee attack.

The new monsters include an electric alien and with the alien queen something tells me that two of the biggest science fiction franchises have been thrown together. The aliens look like bugs from a certain movie about starship troopers, all thats missing is a banana headed alien with acid for blood and skin so black it camouflages against most backgrounds.

Weapons include pistols, assault rifles, flamethrowers, shotguns, electro guns and the biggest of the lot, Project X, but as can be expected ammo for Project X is very scarce. The game suffers from the problem of being only able to shoot in the direction youre facing so this makes boss battles a case of running around till your clear and then firing a few shots before running again, this becomes very tedious especially as there is no dodge or jump button.

Occasionally you are forced to exit the ship and enter zero gravity areas where you walk across the ship, and due to an unexplained reason firing your weapons does not shoot you off the ship at an extended velocity, maybe the gravity systems bleed through on to the hull or something. More importantly how does the flamethrower work in space where there is no atmosphere?

The game includes co-operative play over both local and Xbox Live. In addition to the story mode there is a freeplay mode where you try to beat previously set times and scores.

There is nothing wrong with the game except the unskippable cut scenes. Its just that the game could have been so much more. Team 17 have done an admirable job with the engine and as I have said in a previous review they have captured the heart and soul of the alien breed franchise, but I feel that some improvements could have been made here and there to make the game really stand out from the crowd and make it the must have purchase that the games should have been.

The game is a worthy purchase at 800 Microsoft points but I would wait until either a special offer or you have completed the previous games and want to finish the story and find out the fate of Conrad.