Get ready to experience a grimdark cyberpunk fantasy that will have you blasting through a massive world alone or with friends as violent street gangs and corrupt corporate goons stop at nothing to bury you where you stand. Upgrade your Indent hero as you gain experience, unlock new abilities for your cyberdeck and special augments that make you a God among men. The Ascent, by developer Neon Giant and publisher Curve Digital, is a top-down twin-stick shooter set in a beautifully dystopian city that will have you coming back for more after every play session.
Story
You are an Indent: An indentured Servant who came to the planet Veles seeking a good life. But, like everyone on Veles, you quickly realize the life promised to you must be earned. You either make enough money to buy your freedom, or die trying: whichever comes first. This is made worse when The Ascent Group, the major corporation that owns you and everyone else on Veles, suddenly implodes on itself. With control over Veles now virtually up-for-grabs, the Stacklords scramble to protect their territory while trying to grab more for themselves. You serve beneath one of these Stacklords, who has you perform various missions in order to help him rise to power. As you perform these missions, your status and access to this expansive world increases. Will you rise to power and carve out the life that you’ve set out after, or will Veles swallow you whole as society falls into chaos and madness?
Gameplay & Mechanics
The Ascent is a 2D twin-stick shooter that places violence above everything aside from stunning visuals. As you journey through the Ascent, you will come across various weapons designed to make your enemies, and unfortunate civilians, explode more efficiently than the last. From Pistols and assault rifles with flaming or electrified bullets, to Smart Rockets that detonate on impact and explode crowds of bodies as they do so, you’re never short on firepower. Enhanced by the fact that ammo is limited only by the time it takes to reload and the ability to upgrade every weapon you come across, the endless mobs of increasingly dangerous enemies will give you plenty of opportunities to experiment.
Aside from the guns, your character has various stats such as health, energy, and speed that can be enhanced by purchasing upgrades using ability points or by finding armor that boosts your abilities. There are also special augments found or purchased throughout the world that give special abilities, like a shield that slows down bullets, or a powerful punch that sets enemies on fire (If they don’t first explode from the attack). You’ll spend the majority of your time, between dodging bullets and popping heads, traveling across the massive map doing side quests for the various citizens of Veles. Developer Neon Giant also provides several forms of fast travel to help get around its large maps. Death in The Ascent is no problem at all: barely an inconvenience. Should you happen to fall during your mission, you don’t lose any of your gathered experience points and simply respawn in the nearest area to continue the action. And, while this is incredibly forgiving, it allows you to farm stronger enemies for higher levels of XP and push through the higher difficulty areas to find extremely powerful loot that you definitely shouldn’t have access to at level 5. It also makes crouching and using cover seem like it was an afterthought. While there are instances where you can duck behind structures in the environment and shoot over top of them, the fast-paced action and swarming mobs of enemies makes standing still behind cover a death sentence. While there are certain times where using cover can be helpful, it’s mostly an inconvenient reminder to use your brain in a game that seems to reward mindless shooting.
Aesthetics & Sound
The Ascent is a beautifully crafted dystopian cyberpunk city that checks all the boxes and then some. There are a handful of alien races that inhabit the world with you along with mind bendingly massive buildings covered in so much neon that the night is never truly ever dark. Neon Giant does an incredible job detailing the different areas of the game from the densely populated urban metropolis to the bright and pristine high cities built well-above the clouds. Nothing, however, truly compares to the aptly named Deep Stink: the pit in the center of this massive world where all trash and biological waste are sent. It’s clear that Neon Giant spent much of its time and budget on the game’s visuals.
For current gen consoles, anyway.
If you don’t have an upgraded PC or one of the Xbox Series consoles, you will experience all the same frustrations that seem to follow every Cyberpunkesque title this generation. Unforgivably long loading screens, sudden frame drops and, something I’d never experienced before on a console, memory crashes. While the game is still playable on previous gen consoles, it becomes evident, after the first 180 second long loading screen, that this is a title built for the current generation consoles.
Summary
While The Ascent puts a huge emphasis on its visuals and gunplay, other areas tend to suffer a dip in quality. Conversations with NPCs are just barely interesting, but the fact that there is no autoplay button and you have to manually progress every line of text takes away from mindlessly enjoying the story and almost encourages you to skip through dialogue which, in some instances, don’t really match with the character models. There is one story character who is a blue lizard-looking man with no lips, yet has no issue pronouncing words that require LIPS. This is just one example of the many minor details that pulls you from the immersion either to laugh at or critically critique the design choices for The Ascent. With all that said, it is still an action game that gets the action and setting right, and will still keep you coming back for more.
7.5 / 10
Check Out The Ascent Trailer:
For more information, visit: https://www.curve-digital.com/en-us/games/featured/156/the-ascent/
Related: THE ASCENT Action RPG to Hit Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One consoles, and PC in 2021
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Xbox Review
As the (self-proclaimed) King of Casuals, I'm always seeking out new titles to play and experience across all platforms. Eventually, I have ambitions to take the many different styles of this medium to create titles that will wow the masses in fresh, innovative ways.
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