Sometimes a game comes out that I’ll play all the way through, and then at the end I have basically nothing to say about it. The Ascent is one such game.

So because I can’t review it, I’ll still try to talk about it a bit and see if I can squeeze out… anything.

Let’s go? This will not be a review and should not be considered as such. I won’t really go in-depth with anything. I guess it’s gonna be closer to an impression post?

Developer: Neon Giant
Publisher: Curve Digital
Release date: July 29th 2021
Platforms: PC, Xbone, Xbox Series X/S (PC version played)
Genre: Twin-stick shooter with minor RPG elements

I can start with the positives about this game, specifically the presentation. This game is really fucking nice visually. Considering the small team that made this game, it’s actually wild how good this game looks. It features a pretty cool cyberpunk-ish dystopian world that is super heavily detailed. There’s spots in the game that exist just because… why not. They’ll add nothing to the game as far as gameplay goes, but they just wanted to have this cool spot with this cool vehicle flying in the background or something. Just so much detail to the world. There’s so much going on I could almost believe this is a properly lived-in world. It’s not perfect, some of the character animation is a bit robotic or cheap (if an NPC is sitting on a chair, you can run into the chair to move it and the NPC will then be sitting on air, for example), but I don’t think this really detracts from anything as far as the visuals. If nothing else, this game looks fucking amazing. I will note on PC that the framerates aren’t quite as high as I’d figure, even at 1080p I can barely go above 120fps, I figure I should be able to run it much higher.

The story is a cool concept that… kinda goes nowhere. Basically it takes place on this planet which has different levels. Most people are indents, which is… exactly what that sounds like. In upper levels of the city or planet or whatever, the bourgeoisie lives and does very little actual work. You play as some random no name indent, who does bounty kinda work for randos, and eventually you get hired by a corporation to do work for them, then you fight an interdimensional attacker of sorts, then the game ends. There’s a few characters but they’re not really… important? I’m sure if you stop and read all the lore and do all the side-quests and stuff there’s something there, but just following the dialogue there’s not much here story-wise. Your character isn’t even a character. Doesn’t talk, doesn’t make decisions, you’re just pointed in the direction of things to kill by other pretty boring characters and you kill the target, just to get pointed to the next thing you need to kill. You’re more of a gun than a person. I figured there may be downsides to, like, killing civilians, but there’s not, other than the occasional NPC telling you they’re mad, for example. This is kinda why it felt weird when the game ended maybe, it didn’t feel like much really… happened. You killed lots of things, but it all felt kinda without reason beyond “you’re a slave so you gotta do what the corporations tell you”.

The gameplay is pretty straightforward. It’s kinda interesting in some ways, but I think it needed a bit more to it. It functions as a twin-stick shooter. You can equip 2 guns, 2 special pieces of equipment that uses Energy and one super move that has its own meter (goes up when you get yellow pickups or shoot enemies). You aim in the direction you want to shoot and click the shoot button, very simple combat. There’s not a huge variety of special equipment or supers, just choose whichever one you like… though the supers a bit unbalanced, I really dunno why you’d choose a shitty single hit grenade over the pocket mech which makes you invincible and stronger for like 20 seconds and that almost for sure recovers your super bar so you can spam it. One interesting thing with the combat is that you can crouch and hide behind things, but there’s no set “cover system”, so you have to figure out movement for yourself even when crouching, making it better than cover in most games. Whether you’re crouching or not, holding the right mouse button makes your aim go higher. While crouching that lets you shoot above cover. You also have a dodge roll which is a requirement in most games nowadays. There’s cooldown for dodging but I didn’t really notice anything that tells you when you can dodge which is kinda meh. Combat will mostly be spent crouching behind cover and moving your aim up to hit stuff on the other sides. However you’re never safe behind cover because enemies tend to spawn everywhere around and also move a lot (so unlike normal cover-based shooters, enemies don’t just hide behind cover all the time) so you do need to move and dodge around a lot. A minor annoyance is that dodging makes you un-crouch.

So outside of combat there’s not too much. There’s shops, they’re largely useless so the money you get mostly ends up not being used after the first hour or so of the game when you get all the equipment you need from drops. You level up for completing quests and killing enemies. Each level gives you 3 skill points that you can put in one of 8 skills. Each skill can get up to 20 points put into it, and those skills are pretty… normal. HP, Energy, crit rate, faster reload, resistance to some status effects, stuff like that… they’re all kinda useful but not interesting. Oh and there’s sidequests… you gotta find NPCs, they give you places to go and things to kill, so it’s pretty much like the rest of the game… doesn’t do much to add variety.

Your main ways to power up will be improving weapons and finding better armor. Armor have defense in 4 different categories and sometimes they improve some of the skills too… that’s it, you can buy them in stores or sometimes enemies may drop them. The weapon drops are equally disappointing. Basically there’s a bunch of pretty same-y weapons. Find 2 you enjoy and stick with them, because there’s no “better” weapons. Instead you use components you find laying around (and sometimes dropped by enemies) to improve the weapons (basically leveling them up for better damage and… little else). Basically if you improve the machine gun you like, every other machine gun with the same name will be exactly as strong. There’s no Diablo-style keywords and such that change the elements and properties of a weapon, so weapon drops just suck since they’re the same every time. That early-game rocket launcher is never gonna change. There could definitely be… SOMETHING to the drops. But there’s not.

Overall

Basically I guess my problem with this game is that the combat is pretty same-y the whole way, and there’s not much to make it more interesting. No interesting loot drops, nor really any interesting enemies to fight, nothing really there to keep my interest. It’s fun for a bit, but it doesn’t really… progress much from that starting point.

The great world and detailed graphics are betrayed by pretty meh gameplay and a pointless-feeling story.

I can’t really recommend this one, but it is on Game Pass if you want to give it a try there.

…
I guess that was pretty close to a review.