Ascent into madness
Cyberpunk media is supposed to be cautionary. It extrapolates our current technological landscape, and takes it to its most dystopian logical conclusion. It shows what can happen if technology progresses unimpeded, along with extreme profit-seeking. If you think your current job sucks, imagine if you had to do it with a microchip in your head that tracks performance.
In a really dumb way this review is also cyberpunk. It’s a cautionary tale against the march of technology and profit-seeking. The march of technology being you downloading this game, and profit-seeking being the developers asking for you to buy this game. You shouldn’t do either of those things.
Much like some weird cyberpunk contract where they rent out your brain to mine crypto, I was duped into this game. The store page makes it look like an interesting RPG shooter, and it looks like one. It also plays pretty well, for the first hour. It has all the makings of the kind of game you recommend to your friends based on first impressions, but don’t be fooled. It never improves. It doesn’t offer any interesting RPG elements, the shooting gets stale after a few hours because of the repetitive encounters, there’s no story or actual roleplaying and the worst part of this game…
the thing that makes this go from cyberpunk dystopia to a literal hellscape is that this game is boring.
Read on to find out why you should not believe this game’s lies.
What is it?
The Ascent is an isometric shooter/RPG. Set in a cyberpunk dystopia, you play as a person who must do tasks for other cyberpunk entities. You run and gun through neon-lit streets, shooting at anything and anyone that gets in your way. Level up, get loot and grow stronger to take on the city’s many challenges. Allegedly.
Shooting isn’t the thing you’ll be doing the most, but it’s the most important. It’s a cover-based shooter, which isn’t common in isometric games. You can crouch behind walls and blind-fire over them. Enemies can, and will, do the same. The cover system interacts with the game’s main mechanic, which is the two-tiered height gimmick. When you shoot, you shoot at the enemy’s center mass. If you press right click, you go into an aiming stance, and you shoot at their head. This aim stance lets you shoot over low cover.
There are some RPG elements. You level up, gain points to improve different attributes. Every time you upgrade something, it makes a number go up, which is good, in theory.
You can also find gear and loot. There are different guns to find and use, such as shotguns, pistols, plasma rifles, and armor to make you more… armored.
Along with all that there are modules that give you different abilities. Of course, they’re cooldown based, and for some reason they also use mana, because double limiting is a ton of fun.
These game systems are all there, on the game’s description, but I honestly can’t tell you if they’re in the game or not. They’re so inconsequential, obtuse and ineffective, that I could just say I hallucinated them and it wouldn’t change anything.
You’ll see what I mean as I get more in-depth with the game, starting with the shooting.
Shooting
The Ascent’s shooting mechanics are surprisingly competent. It’s a standard top-down shooter. Twin-stick controls, you can shoot in all directions, you can move and shoot, etc. Very standard, but it works.
The interesting part is the aforementioned aiming system. You can hold down a button to enter an aiming stance, where you raise your gun and shoot at an enemy’s head. Headshots have a much higher chance of staggering an enemy than body shots. Each enemy has a stagger bar, which, when filled, makes them stagger for a second. This is useful for crowd control, to stop enemies from rushing you and to make an enemy stop shooting you.
When it works, it’s a good bit of fun. You have to prioritize targets to get them to stop/ If you’re getting rushed by a melee guy, you can pop him a few times to get him to stand down while you run, or get someone far away to stop shooting at you while you reposition.
The shooting itself is decent, too. The guns have a weighty, tactile feel to them. There’s recoil, but it makes sense. You can control it by tapping your shots instead of letting them rip on full-auto, and it doesn’t feel intrusive.
The gunplay encourages a slower, more tactical play style. You have to pick your angles, fire at priority targets, and move when you can to get into a better position. There is some good moment-to-moment decision making. You can pop a guy real quick to stagger him, then use that small window of time to reposition, or just run in for a close-range kill.
This is all fine and good, but it has a lot of problems, too. The stagger system is cool, in concept, but a lot of times you end up killing an enemy before you get to stagger them. Then there are others, like the melee enemies, that don’t really care about being staggered. They fly at you before you can see them and, like I just said, shoot them, and they just die. More on the enemies in a moment.
The cover system is also half-baked. The vast majority of cover in the game consists of chest-high walls you can crouch behind. It’s not like the cover system in other shooters, where you get close to a wall then suddenly snap to it like it’s magnetized, which is good. Here you can move in and out of cover naturally and easily. Points for that. The problem is that you can sit behind cover and shoot with very little penalty.
When you’re crouched behind a wall, you can aim to blind fire over it. Unlike the blind fire in other games, this one has the same accuracy as regular shots. Since this is a top-down game, you can shoot from cover all you want and you can always see your target. This means most firefights devolve into you sitting behind cover taking shots at another enemy, who is also behind cover, like that one scene in Naked Gun 2 1/2.
If we took the shooting aspect of this game, in isolation, it would be fine. Some good ideas, alright guns, and an interesting approach to crowd control in a shooter. It falls apart once you introduce every other aspect, starting with the enemies and how you fight them.
Enemies and enemy encounters
If you have a cover system in a game, you don’t want the player to sit behind a wall forever. It’s not engaging. At least, that’s what I think. A lot of other cover-based shooters I’ve played seem to be content with letting you sit in a corner and exist for as long as possible. The Ascent puts a lot of effort into chasing you out of cover, which is commendable, but it does this a little too well.
Enemies in this game are split into two broad categories: melee and ranged. Melee enemies will run at you, trying to get close enough to hit you with whatever stick they have on hand. To contrast this, ranged enemies will run at you, trying to get close enough to hit you with their bullets. As we all know, guns are notorious for being close-ranged weapons.
This is one half of the game’s biggest problem (with the combat, at least). Enemies, regardless of their role, all act the same, and will rush you. This makes them all feel the same. It doesn’t matter if they have a high-powered plasma sniper or a regular baseball bat, they will both run at you. Most fights feel like you’re playing a zombie game.
The other half of the combat problem is the movement. Since the game is designed around taking cover, your movement speed is relatively slow. This means you can’t really outrun melee guys, and you can’t dodge shots. Most enemies, when they actually get around to firing their gun, shoot fast, accurate bullets that you can’t move around. Some use plasma shots, which are slower and can be dodged, but most use regular bullets. If you can’t move fast enough, you get a dodge roll with invincibility frames. It has a cooldown, because why wouldn’t it?
A top-down shooter with a dodge roll reminds me of Enter The Gungeon. The difference is that, in Enter the Gungeon, you could avoid getting hit by moving around. The dodge roll was there as a last resort to get through certain bullet patterns. In The Ascent, your dodge roll is your only lifeline against offense, other than sitting behind a wall.
The way fights are structured really contribute to The Ascent feeling like a zombie survival game. While you’re out in the open world, you will run across random hostile mobs. They look like the regular NPCs walking around, they just get really angry when you walk past. Once they see you, they come running in from off-screen, from all angles. I’ve even seen them climb over balconies to flank you. They spawn from everywhere, like rats pouring out of sewer grates. Now you’re surrounded by a pack of ravenous cyberpunk thugs who don’t respect your personal space. Try getting behind cover when three dudes spawn right behind that same wall.
The Ascent’s fights are all the same. You enter a room or pass by a random NPC, a bunch of enemies start pouring in, they run at you and you try to use your little noodle legs to get to safety while plinking away at them with your little pea shooter. Every day is black Friday, and you’re the last air fryer on the shelf.
But this is an RPG, right? Surely, if things get too hectic, you can just upgrade your gear, or use a cool ability, or level up. Get more numbers and overpower your foes.
Weeeelll… about that…
RPG Elements?
Calling The Ascent an RPG is like calling a Snickers a protein bar.
The game’s description on the store page says:
Customize your character with cyberware that suits your playstyle. Allocate new skill points as you level-up and try various augmentations to take down your enemies in new creative ways.
It sounds cool, and you’re probably imagining something like Diablo, where you level up and build a character with skills and such, right? It’s nothing like that.
First, the store page doesn’t tell you that you’re limited to two abilities at a time. Just two. You can’t really customize a build with two active abilities. Second, the abilities are limited by mana. Nothing new, but the ones here use up a ton of mana, and it recovers slowly, making the abilities feel even more limited. Third, you don’t get a lot of them.
In other action RPGs, like Diablo, or Titanquest, you get abilities as you level up. You pick a character class, and go up a skill tree as you progress through the game. The Ascent is a Marxist utopia. A truly class-less society. You create a character, and put numbers in some vaguely defined categories, and that’s it. Your skills don’t come from leveling, you have to buy them or find them out in the world. You’d have a better chance of finding the Holy Grail at your local park than you do of finding a skill in The Ascent. Buying them is the best way to get them, but they are insanely expensive. In five hours of gameplay, I got enough money to buy ONE skill. ONE.
You don’t even get a chance to try the skill out before buying it. You get a short little description of how it’s supposed to work, in a perfect world. It’s like those problems in physics textbooks. Take a spherical object of this mass, assume perfect energy transfer, no friction and disregard air resistance, calculate its trajectory.
I bought a skill that spawns a little robot to fight for you. That’s what the description said. Like everything else in this game, it’s technically correct (the best kind of correct). It does in fact spawn a little robot to fight for you. Snickers do in fact have protein in them. The robot spawns, stands there like an idiot, rushes at an enemy and dies before it can be useful. Fantastic. Glad I spent three chapters’ worth of earnings to buy a low-functioning suicidal android. At least I have my punch skill to fall back on- OH WAIT- activating the robot used up 90% of my energy. Now I can’t use my punch, either. Fantastic. Amazing. Subarashii.
Leveling up is another deep-state conspiracy. You gain levels and upgrade your skills. What do they do? Who knows. They increase numbers. You have the usual health increase, mana increase, resistance to stun. Then there are more esoteric stats like dodge roll cooldown, weapon handling and reload speed. Sure, these are easy to understand at face value, but when you think about them for a bit, they don’t make much sense. Aiming? Sure, it reduces bullet spread, but bullet spread is already a non-factor. The guns are accurate, and whenever you fire at something, it’s a few inches away from you, so weapon spread doesn’t matter. Reload speed doesn’t matter much, either.
An annoying bit about these skills, and a huge pet peeve of mine in general, is that they represent their increments in percentages. The reload skill gives you 6% weapon handling per point. Six percent of what? Does that mean six percent faster reload? Six percent faster weapon swapping? Is that six percent off the time it takes to reload? If it takes one second to reload, if I level it up, will it take 60 miliseconds less? Will I even notice that much of a reduction? The aiming stat goes from 0% to 92% with one point. Does that mean I’m now 92% more accurate? The numbers, Mason, what do they mean!?
There’s a stat for critical hit rate. I thought I was already getting critical hits if I aimed at the enemy’s head, but apparently not. There’s a separate skill that rolls a dice for it.
None of the stat upgrades feel interesting. You get more energy. That’s great, it means you can use your abilities more often. That much is true, but every individual level only gives you enough energy for around 30% of the ability’s cost, so you don’t get an extra use out of it. You need to level up a few times and invest deep into it to see some results. Even then, you have to remember that the skills are all snooze fests. You spend 4 levels investing in the energy stat, only to get an extra cast of your ability, which does a little damage and has a long cooldown. It’s a waste of time.
The pace at which you get everything is painfully slow. I had the same ability for the first four hours of gameplay. Then I managed to get a new one. It was the same with gear. I found one or two new guns, and new armor, but they just increased my numbers here and there.
The lack of options and drip-feeding of content was a common complaint I saw online. Most people echoed the sentiment that you don’t get anything interesting for hour and hours. Builds are nonexistent. Some say that the game does allow for builds once you get into the mid-game, but getting there is a slog. You have to play for around 10 to 12 hours to start getting into the more interesting parts of the game. That’s a huge let down for me.
Even if you get access to more skills later on, you’re still limited to two active skills at a time. With how weak these abilities are, I don’t see how you could make an interesting build with them.
Then there’s the leveling up, and the fact that it just gives you passive number increases. This is nothing like any other ARPG I’ve played. I’ve never felt so restricted in this type of game before.
I would like to go more in-depth with these systems, but there’s one big problem with The Ascent.
It’ SO BORING
I tried to get the facts in first, with my opinion on the systems, but what I really want to say is that this game is boring. It’s the most boring thing I’ve played in a long time. It’s so bad, that I found it unplayable. The little bit of content you get at the start, and the pace at which it’s dripped to the player bit by bit is horrendous, yes, but there’s also a bunch of walking. This game has more padding than a drag queen’s bra.
Everything in this game is between endless walking sections. If you have to do a quest, you have to walk to some guy, talk to him, then walk all the way across the city to the destination, then walk around to do the mission, then walk all the way back to complete it. It’s mind-numbing. I’m not exaggerating when I say every mission starts with at least five minutes of uninterrupted walking. You end up getting your 10,000 steps in for every quest.
There are subway stations you can use to fast-travel, but they’re spread out across the map. You still have to walk to them, then walk from them to your destination. Even with the fast travel the map feels too big and empty. It’s pure padding. Also, if you really need to use the subways all the time, then what’s the point of having a huge map?
Adding to this soul-destroying feeling of boredom is how pointless everything is. This game turns you into a nihilist. What’s the point of fighting a group of enemies? They don’t give you anything for it. You don’t get loot in this so-called looter shooter. You get experience, but so what? So you can level up a few numbers? That’s not fun. If you stop to fight them, they just respawn after a while. You don’t fight them in interesting areas, either. They come out of random spots while you’re walking through a crowded hallway. It’s not fun or challenging to fight them. Since you have to walk 500 miles and then walk 500 more, you’re going to end up encountering dozens of enemies during your painful trudge. After a while I just walked past every enemy and ignored them.
This means that the only place where you should actually fight is in the missions, but it’s pointless there, too. The basic shooting is alright, yeah, but every single encounter plays the exact same. You get swarmed by crazed freaks that run at you and you use your two rinky-dink abilities to kill them. Then at the end of the mission you get a tiny bit of money, and maybe a piece of gear that gives you more numbers.
Something I use as a metric for how much I like a game I’m reviewing, is the amount of time I play it while taking notes. If it’s a game I like, like Wanted: Dead or Katamari Damacy, I’ll play the game for a bit to double-check something in the review, but then I’ll end up playing it for 20 minutes more than I’m supposed to, because I just want to keep playing it. With games I don’t like, such as with Gungrave GORE, I only play enough to get the notes I need and that’s it. With The Ascent, I could barely tolerate it for notes. I opened the game and thought twice about getting past the title screen. I’d think “No one’s going to read this. No one cares about The Ascent. I can just say it sucks and be done with it”, but I wanted to justify my reasoning, even if no one’s reading this. If I didn’t explain why it stinks, someone might think I misunderstood the game and go try it for themselves, and I want to prevent that.
Conclusion
I do not recommend The Ascent, under any circumstance. It’s a boring, trudging game with too much padding, terrible pacing and repetitive combat encounters. You spend 80% of your time in this game walking from point A to point B in a cluttered, messy city. The small amount of time you spend in combat is sleep-inducing, thanks to its terrible fight design.
You can’t even push through the game with the promise of building a cool character, since the RPG systems are as shallow as a puddle. There isn’t any real build-crafting. Every ability is too expensive, they don’t do much and even if you do find one that’s interesting, you’re still limited to two active abilities. Same with the weapons, you can only carry two at a time. That doesn’t allow for much player expression.
The RPG elements are also a complete lie. There aren’t any decisions to make. You don’t play a role in this game. It’s extremely linear. It would be more accurate to call this a bad top-down shooter with slight RPG elements. It’s like an RPG-flavored LaCroix. You get the faintest hint of an RPG somewhere here.
I didn’t even mention the horrible map. Anytime you have to get somewhere, you have to open your map and pick through the hundreds of little icons to find your destination. Same with finding any shops. You go to one of the crowded city centers and navigate a maze to get to a shop. The map says it’s right in front of you, but it’s actually three floors below. Go find the elevator, dummy.
I usually cover the presentation in these reviews, but I don’t care enough about this game to do so. I only want to discuss as much as I need to about it. I didn’t mention the story, either, even though this is supposedly an RPG. I didn’t pay attention to the story. Maybe if the game were any good I’d want to know what was going on.
The main reason why I wrote this whole thing is because I am a scorned customer. I bought this game because I was fooled by its marketing. It looks cool in the trailers, its basic gameplay is alright, and it promises a lot, selling itself as an arcadey action RPG shooter. It’s a cool game, in concept. In reality, it’s none of that. It’s false advertising.
I was the third in a chain of Ascent-based disappointment. A friend of mine bought it on a deep discount because it looked cool. He played it for a few hours. As he was playing it, another friend of mine saw him play it and asked “What’s that? I’ve never seen this before. Looks cool”. He told him it was The Ascent, and it was an action RPG, but that he was waiting to see if it got more interesting, because it plays alright, even if the RPG stuff isn’t too deep. Maybe it gets deeper down the line with more upgrades. That other friend played it, I saw him playing it and the cycle repeated.
Hours later, one by one, we all came to the same conclusion: This game stinks, it’s nothing like it was advertised. We each paid $5 for it, and we felt like we needed a refund, but we played past the 2 hour mark for refunds hoping the game got better. It never did.
If I can save at least one person from buying this, I’ll consider this review a success.
I hated my time with The Ascent. I didn’t complete it, and I have no intentions of ever re-visiting it. I didn’t like what I saw, and I don’t want to see anymore of it. I don’t care if the game opens up after a while, I think a game should be good from the start. Either way, even if this game triples in quality past a nebulous “mid-game” point, it’s still going to be terrible. It’s like saying a cake made of shit gets better after a while because there’s ice cream in the middle. Sure, it’s better, but you’re still eating ice cream covered in shit.
I vehemently disagree. This game revolutionized video games and the medical industry in one fell swoop. It's the first narco-game. Narco standing for narcolepsy and how it instantly beats you into a deep sleep. It solved worldwide insomnia quickly. Amazing little gem.
The Ass Scent is one of the few games in the past few years I've given up on after putting in multiple hours, and never wrote up. It's just too boring to finish or ever boot up again. I spent your whole review excited to tell you that there's a sequel on the way but then I realized I'd misremembered it and it's actually a sequel to Ruiner that's been announced. That's how memorable those two games are.