Descent

Although the keyboard interface for moving and rotating in full 3D space is easily learned, many players initially suffered from nausea and confusion since any viewpoint became possible. With practice, however, most people found the game fluid and very enjoyable
A bigger annoyance for casual players was getting lost in the mines (some of which were very large and complex). Highly experienced players who could memorize the mine layouts became adept enough to play the game with their point of view continually upside-down.

The game also supported the use of two joysticks that could be configured freely, which made playing the game easier than using the keyboard.

Like Doom, Descent provides a navigational wireframe map that will display any area of the mine visited or seen by the player. Since it is truly 3D, however, navigating the map can be challenging, especially so in the shareware demo. The commercial release of Descent made map navigation more intuitive.

Descent never achieved the popularity of more contemporary 3D shooter games, possibly due to the demands on the player to keep his or her sense of orientation in a fully 3D environment with a 6DOF flight model. Additionally, learning to effectively exploit "(tri-) chording" — increasing movement speed by simultaneously pressing the acceleration controls for several movement directions — steepened the learning curve. Nonetheless, the challenge the flight model poses attracted — and continues to attract — players, even 13 years after the first game of the franchise appeared.