Whatever the rate of descent was at the beginning (could it have been for airspeed after the flameout?) it would seem from the photos that the aircraft landed flat, tail's intact. From the TV coverage I saw this evening, the crash site was adjacent to very flat, swampy land at which the guys may have been aiming. At two or three in the morning, pitch black, overcast, little moonlight, not much way of judging altitude or of knowing they'd hit just before a lightly wooded area. Pretty awful situation and the worst of luck.
The dilemma of running out of steam over unknown terrain in the dark was faced by a Varig crew in 1989. PP-VMK, a 737-200, exhausted their fuel after missing Belem and made a forced landing hundreds of miles away. Whether by sheer luck, the right size and consistency of the forest's trees or by skill in flaring at the right time, or a combination of all three, a fair number of people survived. Nearly all of the casualties were due to seats breaking loose and cascading forward during the crash; the hull was pretty much intact.