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The Ascent (PC) Review – Descend into madness

With neon lights, gratuitous violence and more cyberpunk visuals than your eyeballs can absorb, The Ascent was surrounded by a lot of pre-release hype. Being a Day 1 Microsoft Xbox Game Pass title, there’ll be plenty of gamers looking to give this title a go or have already dived right in. What they find might not only surprise them but ultimately might also disappoint them due to a couple of reasons. I’ll get into this shortly.

Development studio Neon Giant and publisher Curve Digital teamed up for The Ascent and the result is a Top-Down Shooter that seemingly oozes neon-soaked, futuristic dystopian style. The game looks incredible and quite literally every single area is dripping with detail right from the get go.

The Ascent Group

Players in The Ascent will start the game off by creating their “Indent”. An Indent is short for Indentured Labourer and that’s exactly what you are. Serving the corporate overlords of The Ascent Group, you will do their bidding on planet Veles. Things start off pretty slow, but after an introductory tutorial segment, The Ascent Group collapses and players will have to team up with a Stackboss to protect their habitat in the Arcology.

The Ascent Screenshot 1The Ascent Screenshot 8

The Arcology is an enormous structure that houses hundreds of thousands of lifeforms, human and alien alike, and is split into tiers. The upper tiers belong to the corporate executives and rich folk while down in the depths lives everyone else. The Ascent certainly ticks the dystopian nightmare checkbox that’s for sure.

This point is driven home even further when you eventually make your way into the game’s hub area and see the squalid living conditions that pass as a habitat or “habstack” as the game refers to it.

The Ascent’s story involves players rising up to protect The Arcology on Veles after The Ascent Group suddenly collapses. The Ascent Group was the largest and most powerful corporation in the game’s world. Security forces along with everything and everyone were pretty much owned by them or under their payroll. Without them, chaos ensues and you’ll be helping your stackboss prevent total societal collapse while navigating the insanity that’s already bubbling through The Arcology.

The Ascent Screenshot 6

The premise behind The Ascent is solid but the execution unfortunately is lacking. Much of the story and lore that the game builds up relies on players having to read codex entries.

The NPCs in the game do explain the basics but there’s a lot of terminology that the game throws at you that would make little to no sense to you unless you specifically read a codex entry about it. Things like an SI which means “Sentient Intelligence” or ICE which refers to “Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics” for example.

This continues throughout the game as you learn more about the game world and it’s a shame that there isn’t more interaction with NPCs in the hub areas. The role-playing aspects of The Ascent are incredibly limited to simple questions and answers and there aren’t branching main story paths here. Thankfully there are quite a few side missions to complete throughout the game which further flesh out the game’s world somewhat.

The Ascent Screenshot 2

Run and Gun

The gameplay in The Ascent involves “twin-stick shooting” since it’s a Top-Down Shooter. Using the left analog stick on your controller to move and the right to aim. It’s fairly straightforward, but there’s additional spice added in the form of augmentations and tactical ability attacks.

Players will be able to use an augmentation based on their current energy reserves and will be able to use a tactical ability once they have enough charge available. Tactical abilities gain charge through battle and over time while energy reserves need to be replenished by picking up blue pickups.

Controlling your character in The Ascent is a mixed bag. Playing with either a controller or with a mouse and keyboard feels rigid. Your character’s movement just has this inexplicable stiffness to it which is compounded and made worse by the fact that their movement speed is just too slow for the game’s extremely vast map.

Players will be spamming the dodge button or key just to move faster through the game world and this is mildly upsetting. Bumping up the movement speed would do wonders for the game’s actual combat gameplay too. There is a fast travel system present in the game but this doesn’t really address the issue of the massive map size and slow movement speed of your playable character.

This becomes painfully obvious the first few times you start dying in missions and respawn far away from your objective.

The Ascent Screenshot 7

Combat is fairly straightforward with players firing a multitude of weapons at their enemies and using their augmentations and tactical abilities while moving around.  Pistols, sub-machine guns, shotguns, assault rifles and more feature in the game and players can equip both a primary and secondary weapon to use in battle.

Swapping between weapons can be done with a simple button press and will be necessary in the heated skirmishes you’ll be engaging in. Reloading time is weapon down time and will adversely affect your chances of survival in The Ascent.

The Ascent Screenshot 3

Enemies in the game are varied but can be grouped into specific types of ranged, armoured and melee. Each faction in the game has numerous enemy types and they will come at you en-masse throughout the game.

The Ascent also has a cover system and a low-aim and high-aim mechanic but these don’t really gel well with the running and gunning necessary to beat your opponents in the game. Taking cover behind something while popping up to fire a high shot barely ever happens because the game throws multiple enemies at you and the melee ones will rush you to beat you to death. Combat is far too frantic and chaotic for the cover system to work well in practice.

Boss enemies in The Ascent are quite tough to beat and players will find themselves repeatedly dying facing off against these foes. Venturing into higher level areas will also swiftly lead to your demise when you either get one shot to death or are rushed by hordes of enemies. Slowly levelling up your character by doing the main story quests and level appropriate side quests keeps you on a rather linear track in the game but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for those who prefer focused adventuring.

Defeating enemies will lead to them dropping loot and players will easily be able to upgrade their armour and weapons from combat. Alternatively, you can spend universal credits back at the hub area to buy new weapons and armour and can upgrade your playable character with skill points and more augmentations at the Grafter (a surgeon).

Weapons can also be upgraded to more powerful versions should you have enough parts available. Weapons can also have cosmetic skins applied to them but currently this is glitched with players losing their skins upon exiting and re-entering the game. What The Ascent lacks in customisation, however, is the fact that there really isn’t much choice in the game’s combat.

There’s no real character class customisation and players are locked into using their two types of weapons with their selected augmentations and tactical ability. If you wanted to be a full on hacker type character using only ICE in battle, you’re out of luck here. A lot more could have been done to expand on the combat and the RPG aspects of the game and some gamers might find this immensely disappointing.

The Ascent Screenshot 4

Where The Ascent excels is in its environmental design. As mentioned above, every single scene in the game is dripping with detail and is a visual feast for the eyes. It’s a shame the game doesn’t have a photo mode because there’s so much to take in. The game world and the underlying lore is truly a work of art and the soundtrack in The Ascent is excellent too.

The OST can only be described as being filled with absolute bangers. Kudos to Pawel Blaszczak (The Witcher composer) who has done an amazing job here. Synth heavy tracks dominate and it perfectly suits the game’s entire aesthetic and theme.

The Ascent Screenshot 5

Final Verdict

Overall, The Ascent is a fun game that’s marred by some baffling design decisions. Slow movement speed, combat that becomes extremely chaotic/frantic and numerous bugs and glitches (such as Raytracing and DLSS not being enabled on the Xbox Game Pass PC version of the game) have sullied an otherwise great co-op shooter.

Players who play this title with friends will most likely find it a lot more enjoyable than those who play it solo.

At roughly around 15 hours or so, there is plenty of content to enjoy here though. Best call up some friends and enjoy the game together if you can, you’ll most likely have a blast.

Disclaimer: A review code was provided to Hypertext by the publisher.

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