The view is first person within the cockpit though.
I think Descent and other similar 6dof FPS games (
six degrees of freedom) get largely forgotten because people just aren't used to those being a common thing. Most people's experience with that style of movement or lack of gravity usually is in flight or space combat games. Descent's still definitely a FPS though in terms of how it plays, how its levels are designed, how it's paced, how your strafing movement works, etc, just one where you're weightless in a zero-gravity environment and can rotate and strafe in any direction.
The 6dof FPS subgenre never really took off understandably, as having maps with no "true" up or down in them is not always easy for people to understand. Descent did its best to make levels easy to navigate with a very robust minimapping system and level textures that clearly had "floor" textures on one side and "ceiling textures" on the other (often with lights embedded) so that individual rooms often had a clear up and down you could orient yourself to if you wanted, but it's still going to be disorienting for people who aren't used to weightless navigation.
What are people's general opinions on early "flat" FPSes like Wolfenstein, where there's no height at all in levels? I don't know what this subgenre was called, and I was never crazy about Wolfenstein specifically, but there were some good ones out there. I was always fond of Catacomb 3D, the one where you're a wizard pumping out fireballs exploring a decrepit tomb, but there was also Blake Stone, a fairly complex one where you're infiltrating an enemy installation and interrogated scientists, stuffed your face from vending machines for health, etc.
A recent one I discovered that feels like it's a very early rendition of a System Shock game is "Wrath of Earth" I'm sure I've gushed about on the forum already. You're in a complex power-suit with a wide array of HUD functions, in a solar-powered armoured suit that recharges in sunlight or brightly lit indoor areas (or from batteries you can find). It's quite complex, with you having to watch out for extreme cold or extreme heat that will slowly drain your shields, or sources of high radiation or lava, which can kill you pretty much instantly if you wander into them (your temperature/radiation meters will give you plenty of warning when you're in the area where this is a hazard, and you can switch your suit to an infrared mode that can detect areas of extreme cold or heat).
Interestingly, for a "flat" FPS it's very complex, and you'll find it important to get to lit areas to autorepair when you're seriously injured as your suit systems actually can get damaged when your shields take serious hits, such as causing flickering, making weapons fire less rapidly, losing lock-on abilities so you can't fire homing weapons, losing the ability to see any of your HUD meters, etc.
There's a few cool weapons such as homing plasma and homing missiles that automatically lock on to up to 4 different targets to fire at, but you also have to deal with enemies that can jam your homing systems, forcing you to use dumbfire missiles or cannons, enemies with cloaking systems that automatically stop to disguise themselves as various bits of terrain when looking at them (until you turn away and they start firing, or you get wise to their antics and fire on them in advance). Wrath of Earth is pretty neat, honestly, and it's got of different wall/environment textures as part of the artwork, like I'm only in the early part of the game and there's way more than even in DOOM.