A Long, Long Way to the Top
The Ascent is a twin-stick shooter RPG set in an almost painfully detailed cyberpunk world, and the most striking thing about it is that world. The game takes place in one of those arcology things that I first heard about in SimCity 2000, on a distant, dystopian planet called Veles, and once you’ve fought your way out of the first location (a deep, industrial area teeming with mutated “ferals”), this arcology is artistically and impressively realised.
A city built on multiple layers, metal walkways, piled rubbish, alleyways with bars and shops with detailed interiors, hordes of NPCs hanging around or walking here and there, dancing holograms, passing hover-cars, shining neon lights, and crazy-looking alien races, there’s something to look at everywhere you go in this game. You’re very much encouraged to explore every corner, too, with side-quests and hunts for upgrade parts taking you behind every dumpster and inside every high-tech, equipment-strewn laboratory. The Ascent’s world and ambience is an amazing achievement, but I never felt fully compelled to uncover every area and interact with every NPC, and found myself glazing over when any of those odd-looking alien fellows tried to lay any kind of lore on me.
It might be because of the pacing. The world is large and sprawling, and while there are fast-travel options, they are limited and come with some hefty load-times. Also, whenever you try to walk anywhere you’ll find yourself constantly attacked by veritable hordes of tooled-up cyber-assholes to an immersion-breaking extent. It does get annoying, and it gets you to wondering where the heck The Ascent’s equivalent of MAX-TAC are. These streets are absurdly lawless, and wandering NPCs are constantly strolling into the line of fire and getting themselves spectacularly dismembered. It’s too much and it’s all the time, and it took me out of the world.
As for the gameplay, it’s pretty good. The violence unfolds in satisfying fashion when you’re not overloaded by the non-stop backtracking encounters, and there are loads of weapon-types and techy skills and upgrades to fiddle about with until you find a character build you like. It does feel clunky sometimes, though, and there are some frustrating difficulty spikes to the point that on one or two occasions I felt that I had to cheese my way through. It was that, or grind a few levels, and I wasn’t enjoying the combat enough (and nor was it mindless enough) for me to go grinding.
The Ascent is undoubtedly a good game, and the environments are nothing short of stunning, but some frustrating battles, user-unfriendly fast-travel and world design, long load-times and occasional slowdown all hold it back from being as great as its visual design deserves. I found myself wishing it was a little bit more linear and a little bit more action-coded. A bit more of a quickie, if you will.
I bet it’s a lot of fun to play cooperatively, though! If your pals can put up with the load-times and constant wandering around, that is.
Played on PS4