When The Ascent was revealed as an initial launch game for the Xbox Series X (prior to its delay), I thought that it was exactly what the platform needed. A game that not only flexed its graphical muscles for the next-gen hardware, but one that also provided a new IP on its side (even if it did get a PC release as well). Developers Neon Giant clearly aimed at delivering the most dazzling cyberpunk game that they could, with loads of detail and characters around every corner, and one that wanted to deliver a unique alien world as well. It was exactly the type of game that I felt would give the Series X a good test when it came to the graphics department.
The Ascent does deliver in that area. From the filthy lower levels of the deepStink to the pristine levels of the Pinnacle, every location here is a visual stunner. From the impressive lighting to the hard work put into every unique structure to every speck of dirt, all of the visuals and effects and a sight to behold. Even the various alien races you encounter in huge crowds as you casually walk the streets have unique and well-crafted designs, and the artistry put into crafting a creative cyberpunk universe, even with all the expected tropes in play, is something to be commended. And all of this is backed up by Pawel Blaszczak’s stunning electronic soundtrack, one that sets the mood perfectly. Yes, The Ascent did indeed end up become a true showcase for the graphical power of the Series X, one that could arguably called masterpiece in that department.
Set on that Planet Veles, The Ascent sees you playing as a disposable worker that belongs to the Ascent Group, a massive corporation that owns the entire metropolis which you reside in, a tower-like arcology where the the most successful can afford to live at the higher levels. But one day, the Ascent Group seemingly goes belly-up for seemingly no reason, leaving you and your boss to try and figure out what the hell just happened and what to do next before someone even worse comes in to scoop everyone up. And so you set out to help solve all of the various dilemmas resulting from this, and by “solve” I mean “repeatedly shoot at.”
The Ascent’s core gameplay is that of a top-down twin-stick shooter, and when it comes to the basics, they’re executed perfectly. After all, it’s hard to mess up arcade-style gameplay this simple, but there are still a few twists to it that elevate things, like the various augmentations that you can collect. They get creative at times, allowing you to equip enhancements that can tag enemies to inflate and explode upon death, save your current health level and restore it after a brief period of time, or even allow you to summon explosive spiderbots or an entire mech using regenerating energy, with the cost varying by augmentation.
Of course, to increase energy levels, you can either equip specific great that provides boosts to it or invest skill points, which goes for health, damage resistance and more. Nothing that unique, but it gets the job done, and trying to keep a good balance going provides a nice challenge. The various weapons that you can equip on the fly all have a good kick to them, provide respectable weight and are fun to toy with, especially when it comes to automatic rocket launchers or sniper rifles with energy bolts. And one nice touch is the ability to aim upwards, which adds a bit of strategy when taking cover or firing up stairs (though it makes the lack of an ability for you and your enemies to fire downwards seem kind of awkward).
The combat isn’t what hurts The Ascent. What hurts is that there’s a good fifteen or so hours of it. It’s like how chocolate cake is a delicious treat, but there’s still only so much of it that you can eat over and over for an extended period until you vomit. Except the emphasis here is on “extended,” though, as The Ascent is a painfully slow game. In several ways, actually, ranging from the pacing to even the speed of your character, who lacks a sprint function of any kind, even when hordes of katana-wielding goons are hot on their ass. And trust me, you will be begging for your character’s movement to speed up, because there’s going to be a lot of walking. Tons of walking to the next objective, tons of walking back, tons of watching the same backgrounds and NPC dialogue pop up. It mind not sound bad when I mention on paper, but things drag at times.
The good news is that the game does provide fast travel…and the bad news is that it’s an awkward form of fast travel. Well, two forms of fast travel, to be accurate. One is the metro lines, which you can only enter at various stations and can only travel to other stations. The more traditional form of fast travel is a taxi that you can summon at any time outdoors and which takes you to more specific areas, but at the cost of a thousand credits each time. This is a pain early on the game when you’re likely to have less funds, but once you start selling various goods you pick up and start earning tends of thousands of credits later on, it becomes less of an issue, if still annoying.
There’s a huge catch, though: neither method can take you between the arcology’s various levels. Only specific elevators can do that. So even with fast travel, you’re in for a lot of trudging between the elevators. And moments like this go on for the entire game. Things just seem to be structured so questionably, as if it was put together in such a way simply to pad out the runtime. It’s the type of game where you finish off a massive boss battle in the grimiest depths of the deepStink, then meet a new boss who wants to work with you and says to go meet them in another area on another level to get your next assignment…which as it turns out has you heading back into the deepStink.
And then there are the combat encounters in between, and again, while the gameplay is perfectly fine, the layouts are just too predictable. Once your character pulls out a gun, you’re able to practically predict each time a semi-random goon squad will appear, even without the mini-map. And these moments started to get repetitive quickly, not helped by the game reusing the same locations again and again, and it says a lot that bosses demoted to semi-regular goons appear less than a third of the way in. There’s a decent variety of enemies, but you’ll get tired of them quickly, not helped by things being radically uneven at times.
Here’s a bit of advice for any game featuring RPG elements: If you plan on bringing up a recommended level a player should be at for a quest, then maybe it would be nice if all of the enemies in this quest would actually be around the same level as well (looking at you,modern Assassin’s Creed games). Too often would I take on a quest, begin heading heading to a location, and then midway there find enemies three, five, or even seven or so levels above me. Then I prepared for the worst, only to actually get to the location and find equally leveled enemies again, or even some notably below my current level. Not helping things yet again is the fact that as it advances, The Ascent falls into the particular design trap of throwing larger groups of enemies at players as a substitute for more challenge. It’s an impressive visual feat to see so many enemies, sure, but even when dealing with a bunch of low-level Ferals, it can quickly get grating. It also gets grating when encountering enemies results in,as Yahtzee put it,a “cockup cascade” where getting detected by an enemy and having to fight them apparently rings the dinner bell for any other groups of enemies, who themselves eventually attract other enemies, and suddenly you’re dealing with several high-level enemies all at once.
The fact that I mentioned getting detected might suggest that you may actually choose to sneak around enemies instead of confronting them. And this is true on some occasions, including when the game has neutral enemies (basically meaning they won’t kill you if you keep moving past them and don’t get too close), but most of the time the level design basically just herds you through confrontations anyway, even when you do try maneuvering around them. The worst case is one instance where I had to get into a laboratory that had about ten neutral foes guarding the front. Because they were neutral, I easily sneaked around them to the entrance, hacked the door, opened it, all without alerting them…and then the game refused to give a prompt allowing me to enter. It would only do so after killing all of the enemies, despite having no reason to do so now.
The meat and potatoes here is the bang-bang shooty-shoot action, but it wouldn’t have hurt to throw in some more variety. Maybe some dialogue choices that affect things, a touch more stealth, but instead, everything is gunplay, Even one side quest I undertook where I simply had to plant bacteria and gather it later had several more Ferals guarding the area when I came back to harvest it. The game didn’t even bother to justify it plot-wise with anything like the Ferals being attracted to the bacteria, there was just a ton of enemies outside because this was seemingly the only trick The Ascent knows.
To be fair, though, I ended up skipping as many side quests as possible. For one, again, the recommended levels are wildly unbalanced, with the game doling out missions that apparently recommended that your level be ten or fifteen ones higher than it currently is even at the very start of the game. It even gives you quests that end up involving areas that you can’t actually access until you’re several hours into the main story, even if the recommended level here is shockingly low, which can result in the waypoints given botching things up. But it’s difficult to become invested in the side quests and the characters involved, as they felt disposable. To drive this home, practically every character giving these quests talks to you with their back to the camera, speaks in a form of Simlish (as opposed to the main story’s characters, who all get full voice acting), and doesn’t even get a unique model for their their codex entry. Just the same generic group model shot for all of them. It’s like even the game realizes that they aren’t going to leave any sort of impact.
It’s a shame, because the story at the center of the game where you have to get to the bottom of the Ascent Group’s disappearance is mostly well-done. It could be predictable with a couple of plot twists, but it does have good performances and well-written dialogue, with your “IMP” AI sidekick providing a good dose of humor now and then. Overall, The Ascent is an okay game, but it’s bogged down by so many poor design choices that build up into a blob of dullness, repetitiveness and frustration that threatens to overshadow everything too often. I didn’t even get around to the times the fixed camera angles obstruct things (including at least one moment where they basically turn the game into a side-scroller of all things), the times the game seemed to place non-existent side missions on the map or any other possible bugs. There’s a good game in The Ascent, and there seem to be a good chunk of people getting into the game, but it just turned into a slog for me.
Closing Comments:
The cyberpunk world of The Ascent seems dazzling on the surface, but much like your standard cyberpunk world, the grime underneath all of the neon and futuristic landscapes ends up revealing a hefty mess once you go exploring it. The top-down shooter gameplay is fun on a basic level, but quickly becomes monotonous as it drags on in order to keep up with the RPG-styled length and ambitions, while the RPG side of things has a good story and some nifty gameplay tweaks, but its desire to keep the gameplay focus on being a top-down shooter means that any potential when it comes to depth and variety is never fully realized. If you’re a die-hard cyberpunk fan, don’t mind a lot of repetition or have friends to join along, there can be fun here as you ascend, but the rest might be better skipping the trip up.
