The Ascent feels like two very different games. One of those games is an enjoyable aRPG in an over-the-top cyberpunk world where you find new equipment, upgrade your weapons and abilities, and take on odd jobs in an attempt to better your character’s situation. In many ways, this feels like a combination of the canceled Prey 2 and what a lot of people mistakenly expected Cyberpunk 2077 to be like, all filtered through a world that combines the alien-rich population of Mass Effect with Blade Runner‘s rainy dystopia. The other game is the one that undermines that first one; The Ascent is plagued by a massively uneven difficulty curve and littered with numerous design decisions that are downright player-hostile. One moment you’ll be plowing through countless waves of enemies, and then someone 10 levels higher than you will kill you from off-screen with a single bullet. The Ascent can be a fantastic game at times, but it’ll take some serious patching and rebalancing to bring it to a point where it’s consistently great.
The Ascent‘s story bombards you early on and takes a while to get going, but it’s decent
Early on, I wasn’t entirely clear on who I was or what the words NPCs would use actually meant. Part of the problem has to do with conversations frequently taking place during combat, leaving text at the top-left of the screen during chaotic firefights that you can’t afford to look away from. A contributing factor is The Ascent‘s early penchant for assuming a baseline amount of knowledge that you don’t yet have, leaving you frantically digging through codex entries to try and decipher the barrage of information that was just dropped on you. In a lot of ways, though, the early game exists solely to get you comfortable with the world. The story doesn’t really get going until around the game’s halfway mark. It’s all very strange.
You play as an indent—a contracted worker who’s essentially a slave to a corporation—to the Ascent Group when it mysteriously goes bankrupt. Early on, you run errands for a lower-level boss of the corporation while he attempts to hold the (literally and figuratively) tiered metropolis of Veles together. Eventually, though, you begin working for another character who promises you freedom in return for investigating the circumstances of the Ascent Group’s collapse.
You’re never really doing anything beyond running errands for various characters, then, but the story begins to take on some flavor when a murder-appreciating AI replaces your (incredibly boring) original digital assistant. There’s just something about the way she casually refers to your character as “flesh” that adds a lot to the world.
At the end of the day, The Ascent‘s story is one of those “janitor of the post-apocalypse” stories where you just run around cleaning up after something terrible happens. And it can be incredibly confusing at points thanks to some characters who look nearly identical. That’s not to say that the writing doesn’t have its charms, though, because I ended up enjoying taking on odd mercenary jobs (all of which consist of “go to a place and murder everything in your way”) on behalf of random characters in the world. One character wants you to obtain a secret recipe. Another invents a sob story to trick you into getting involved in a deathmatch while betting on your survival. The mechanics may not vary much between sidequests, and the characters aren’t innately memorable, but everyone adds just enough flavor to make the world a memorable place to wander around in.
It’s rarely clear how basic mechanics work, so a lot of the gameplay becomes guesswork
At its core, The Ascent is a simple top-down aRPG shooter. Around 20% of the population wants to murder you, so there are always groups of baddies standing between you and wherever you’re going. Killing baddies earns you experience, and leveling up increases the amount of damage your bullets inflict in addition to giving you skill points that can be invested in stats that moderately improve your health, reload speed, and other things important to the combat. You can also buy or find new weapons and equipment to improve your offense and defense (and these also impact the look of your character, which is a great touch), as well as equip augmentations for passive bonuses and active abilities that recharge over time.
The only problem with any of this is that your weapons can be upgraded with relatively rare components, and these can’t be recovered from weapons that you’re no longer likely to use. It’s not uncommon to spend all of your resources and then stumble across a better version that suits you more. You’ll likely continue to invest in the old model because of the prohibitive number of resources required to upgrade the new one to the same level.
Many of The Ascent‘s underlying problems are rooted in its tendency to go all-out. Take the cover system, for example—you’re expected to duck behind cover and press a button to aim above it and fire at enemies from relative safety. This is great in theory. However, the camera angle makes it difficult to tell what you can fire over and which enemies you can hit (because they also use cover). Some enemy attacks damage you through cover. Ground slams damage you for sure, while bullets can sometimes glitch out and pass through cover.
And enemies immediately flank you, meaning that the entire mechanic is usable for about three seconds max toward the end of the game.
The only time I found myself using cover was when things were going horribly awry. Most of the time, cover served primarily as the annoying part of the environment I’d get stuck on while trying to run/dodge away from enemy fire. This isn’t The Ascent‘s biggest problem, but it’s representative of the way its lofty ambitions quickly become its biggest liabilities, turning an otherwise enjoyable aRPG into an exercise in frustration.
The Ascent also does a terrible job of communicating what’s happening during fights. The screen quickly becomes awash in lighting effects and bullets, and it gets to the point where the only way of telling how much damage you’re taking is to look away to your health bar at the bottom-right of the screen. I can’t even count the number of times I came out from cover and started eliminating enemies who were doing a bearable amount of damage to me, only for a jerk with a minigun to wipe me out in seconds before I even noticed his arrival. I legitimately can’t tell if there’s too much feedback or not enough. The end result is the same, though—many times, I had no idea that I was at risk of dying until I had dropped dead.
There are several tweaks that would make The Ascent a much smoother experience
If you kill a group of enemies, no more enemies should spawn from that area for a while. The Ascent currently handles enemy spawns like Dragon Age 2, allowing enemies to spawn all around you, even from areas you’ve just cleared. This needs to be reconsidered because constantly being surrounded by enemies who appear from nowhere makes the cover system even more useless than it already is. Another change I’d appreciate would be rethinking elevation; there are numerous staircases, and it’s never obvious when you and your opponents are at the same level. Worse, they can seemingly shoot high to hit you while you lack the ability to shoot low to hit them. Ultimately, this is a pointless complication that worsens combat.
Another change I’d love to see is to fast travel. Veles is separated into four layers with different towns on each layer, and the taxis and trains don’t currently allow you to visit areas on different layers. This forces you to fast travel to a town, run to the elevator, then fast travel again to a spot close to your destination. It’s wildly slow and inconvenient.
Another problem with fast travel is that quest markers only show up in the fast travel menu if the marker is in an area that can be fast traveled to. If it’s right on the outskirts of a town, you have to use the confusing map to figure out which fast travel spot is closest. Ideally, the closest fast travel spot would be indicated to save you the trouble.
More than anything, though, The Ascent needs a major rebalance patch. Like your character, enemies gain damage increases as their levels increase, which makes the decision to place enemies 10 levels higher than your current level adjacent to main mission areas a painful one. A single stray bullet can mean instant death, and yet you’re encouraged to explore to find new equipment. You can have exploration or areas that are gated off by instant-death mobs. Not both. And while you’d think that the gameplay becomes less awkward once you can hold your own against these mobs, the late-game content has an annoying habit of sticking you in a room and rushing you with enemies who appear from all sides.
Sometimes The Ascent just flat-out breaks and spawns multiple bosses or ten times fewer enemies for no apparent reason. A couple of times, a tough enemy got stuck in the environment and flailed around helplessly. On a bunch of different occasions, I’d curb stomp entire rooms of enemies, only to be humbled by a spider robot with a ton of health and a flamethrower with an unclear range. And there are all kinds of questions that accompany these difficulty spikes. Why are anti-robot energy weapons so terrible compared to normal ones? Why are turrets always far enough from enemies that they can run back to their starting point and recover all of their HP? And why don’t enemies take full damage when they’ve followed you too far?
The art makes for serious screenshot bait, but it pushes fidelity at the cost of helpfulness
I expected that I’d have to turn down a bunch of settings and play The Ascent at medium-ish settings to get a playable frame rate. Instead, it averaged a comfortable 40-60 FPS at ultra settings on my RX 580 once I dropped the resolution to 1920x1080, with that dropping down into the mid-30s when I was recording. The screenshots I’m including with this review are at 4K ultra, and that’s really just a case of me loving the moody look so much that I’d occasionally raise the resolution and play a little bit at 10-20 FPS so that I could have extra pretty screenshots. Needless to say, I like The Ascent‘s look. I can’t give it a 2/2, though, because the visuals often make it difficult to see what’s happening. The bloomy lighting and chromatic aberration and miscellaneous post-processing make this one of the most beautiful Unreal Engine 4 games I’ve ever seen, but all of these visual flourishes obscure important information in combat. Sometimes I’d fail to see enemies shooting me directly in the face, which isn’t great.
Okay, so here’s the thing: pairing electronic soundtracks with cyberpunk is a pet peeve of mine. If that’s the only way cyberpunk works for you, then go ahead and add another point to my score, but it’s such a common and expected pairing that it loses the ability to stand out by acting as a contrast. The Ascent‘s soundtrack is one of the better ones I’ve heard in this style, pairing crunchy, arpeggiated synths during action scenes with filtered, detuned pads that sometimes drift into that lilting, “Vangelis sound” territory. But Blade Runner also contrasted its synthy elements with more evocative instruments like the saxophone, and even well-produced music becomes easy to tune out when it’s all basically the same thing.
There are standout tracks regardless, with my favorite being “Pristine Facade,” which plays in a high register that allows its synths to approximate bells and piano. The problem is that I only recognize this song from the soundtrack. I couldn’t tell you when it plays in-game. Most of The Ascent is spent listening to other tracks that have much less of a contrast. I’d have been all over a soundtrack with more tracks like Pristine Facade, though.
Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 1.5/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean
*A Steam key was provided for this The Ascent review. It took me 16 hours to finish the main story (though I could have used fast travel more often) and a couple more to finish up some sidequests.
The Ascent review – Unbalanced by oodles of potential first appeared on Killa Penguin
