Descenders is a downhill freeriding game where the worlds and trails are procedurally generated so you'll never quite know what to expect. It just left Early Access today and got a big feature update: Multiplayer. While you're challenging yourself with terrifying speeds down narrow, winding paths and hurtling through dizzying jumps upside-down, you'll now find yourself racing alongside other players.

I've been playing a bit today, working my way through the early stages of my downhill biking career and wiping out plenty of times along the way. The default keyboard controls take a bit of getting used to, but after a few courses they felt comfortable, and they can be fully remapped at any rate.

Wiping out isn't as funny as it is in, say, Trials, but it's still amusing. Especially when something happens like in the gif above, where it appears I've somehow gotten my torso wedged in my bike frame.

As you progress through your career, you'll also unlock bonus 'team members', who can influence the details of the next course by making the trail a bit wider or adding extra jumps or checkpoints. Descenders throws in randomly selected challenges in each course. If you complete the course without ever letting go of the acceleration key, for example, or by getting a total of six seconds of air, you'll gain an extra life which lets you crash one additional time on your next run.

Sometimes the map's features, difficulty, and challenges combine in interesting ways, such as when the map must be beaten in first-person mode, it's raining, and there's no actual trail, leaving you on a harrowing trip speeding between trees and rocks and desperately trying to spot the finish line. Make your way through the map and you'll reach the 'boss', a course with a massive jump. Beat a few boss jumps and you'll unlock new worlds to race through.

I haven't played a ton of it yet, but it's fun and exciting. Don't expect the procedural generation to be too bananas: This isn't No Man's Sky, after all, and plenty of courses have felt more or less the same even though there are small differences. It feels like just enough to throw a couple surprises in your path and keep you alert at all times. You can find Descenders on Steam, where it's 25% off for the next week.

A month after launching its own game store, Discord's version of Early Access has gone live with an impressive five-game lineup.

The "first wave" of Discord Early Access games includes whimsical RPG Kynseed, cute dino management game Parkasaurus and downhill biking game Descenders, which could well be the heir to Skate's throne.

The other two games are Mad Machines, which is basically Rocket League with robots, and PT-inspired horror game Visage. Yes, it's only five games, but I'm impressed with the quality that Discord have pulled on board.

Mad Machines is the only one that's exclusive to Discord: it's part of the 'First on Discord' programme, which will see some games launch on the Discord store first as timed exclusives. The others are already part of Steam Early Access, and cost the same on Discord as they do on Steam.

One potential advantage over Steam, I suppose, is that playing through the Discord games launcher means you're already set up to chat to other members of the community and, sometimes, directly to the developers themselves by using Discord's verified servers. 

You can access the games through your Discord app or via its website, and you can find more details about the individual games on Discord's blog post.

For an indie developer in 2018, getting people to care about your game can be a daunting proposition, filled with all manner of marketing tactics and PR plans. But sometimes, all you really need to sell a game is a good gif.That’s exactly how I discovered Descenders, the sophomore release from a tiny Dutch studio called RageSquid. For the last couple months, their Twitter feed has been an endless procession of gifs and short videos of a virtual mountain biker hurtling through a variety of pleasant environments at ludicrous speeds, jumping and flipping through the air.With Descenders now hitting Early Access on Steam, I’m pleased to report that it mostly lives up to the excitement evoked by the footage that piqued my interest in the first place. While still light on content, the core experience is already enjoyable, and the dev team seems to have a solid plan for fleshing out the game going forward.

Right out of the gate, Descenders just plain feels good. It activates the same parts of my brain the old Skate games did, with a fairly simple system of analog inputs that can be fine tuned to infinity, or at least until I get that trick or jump just right. The bike handling is pleasantly responsive, if not terribly simulational, and the sound and art give the whole thing a satisfying solidity without going too overboard on state-of-the-art photorealism.

If you’ve been pining for a new game to play on the couch with friends, passing the controller back and forth every time you bail, this may be the game to finally scratch that eight-year itch that’s been left unscratched since the untimely demise of the Skate series. There’s also a laundry list of “gaps” in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater tradition, and a Spelunky-style “daily challenge” mode will be added shortly.

One of Descenders' main hooks is that all of its stages are procedurally generated, causing the terrain to change with every successive playthrough, but whether or not that’s a good thing isn’t quite clear yet. The nigh-infinite variety of courses is certainly nice, and for the most part Descenders does a good job of generating enjoyable routes, but occasional hiccups in the algorithm can be exceedingly frustrating in a game with as unforgiving of a progression system as this one.

You begin with four health, and can lose one to three points when you bail, depending on how hard you faceplant. Lose them all, and it's back to the very beginning of the world map. But thanks to the procedural levels, on several occasions I was presented with jumps that had such steep hills on the other side that hitting the jump caused me to pancake upon landing (and lose at least two of my precious four starting health), despite hitting the apparently 'correct' spot on the landing ramp. 

The bonus objectives, which while theoretically optional are the only way of restocking the health you lose upon crashing, are often rendered impossible by the vagaries of the terrain generation. An attempt to “do a 720” or “exceed 70km/h” can be foiled by a lack of large jumps, or a lack of sufficient steepness in the track, respectively. These issues can presumably be tuned out of the algorithm over time, but for the moment they remain rather frustrating.

Procedural generation issues aside, the primary reason I have a hard time wholeheartedly recommending Descenders in its current state is that there isn't all that much to it right now.

The roguelike-esque progression system is an interesting idea, but success won't reward you with new abilities to mess around with or statistical buffs. Descenders never really changes up the experience no matter how many runs you get through. There are cosmetic unlocks such as new bikes, shirts, and helmets, but those don’t change the play, and I felt like I’d more or less seen all there was to see after a couple hours of playing (though I could always just keep improving my skills, if I wanted).

Of course, that criticism comes with a major caveat: this is an Early Access game. More things to do are on their way, and the dev team has already announced a bunch of forthcoming features. Among these is the aforementioned daily challenge mode, as well as a tournament system, an expanded world map with new environments, and “rider improvements” (which may or may not mean real-deal, non-cosmetic unlocks).

I’m optimistic that Descenders will grow into a meatier game, and in the meantime, it’s a great way to kill a few hours in a super fun sandbox. I’m glad the developers chose to make something in such an under-populated genre, and devised a pretty unique format to boot. I expect Descenders' fate will largely be contingent on whether or not this fantastic core experience is fleshed out into something heftier.

"The PC needs a new skateboarding game," we said back in May, and that remains the situation because, sorry to say, we're still not getting one. But we are getting something that might just scratch the sports on wheels itch: Descenders, an "extreme downhill freeriding" game that new indie publisher No More Robots described as "essentially Skate on bikes." 

Descenders makes use of procedurally generated maps and a "fully-fledged physics systems" that enables players to string together extreme combos on unique downhill runs. Make it to the bottom of the moutain without eating a tree, a rock, or other such unyielding bone-breakers, and you'll earn "Rep points" for you and your community-based team: Enemy, Arboreal, or Kinetic. Each has its own colors and gear, and they'll be in constant competition for top spot on the monthly leaderboards—and the prizes that come with it. 

Teams will also have leaderboards of their own, and members will have access to exclusive practice and social areas in the "Descenders Overworld." 

And it looks awfully fast. I haven't played it, like you I've only watched the trailer, but seeing the two-wheeled warrior get smoked by a hill, a ramp, and a tree made me wince a little on the inside. Always wear your helmet, kids. 

Descenders doesn't have a release date yet, but you can sign up for the upcoming beta by choosing your team at descendersgame.com.