I really wanted to like this game. Some bits of gameplay highlights looked really awesome. Some didn’t.

But then they showed a lot of story stuff and holy fuck was it bad. People talk about Marvel-level dialogue, but this is way worse than even the worst Marvel lines. But that’s just story. It’s a video game, story is not important if the gameplay isn’t good, so I still had hope that the gameplay would be okay, which is why I kept my discounted pre-order going.

So I gave this game 10 hours of my time. And I’m done with it. So let’s talk about why I’m giving up on this!

I was pretty excited about this game. It looked really cool. It’s pretty okay, but by the end, I was just tired of playing it. I have 92% of the game done now and I’m not feeling like finishing it.  I don’t really have a whole review’s worth of things to say about it. So I’ll keep it quick, and vague, and I will not even have a real “read more” link.

The game is kinda fun with the deliberately slow movement/attacks (which makes sense, to simulate the kind of stuff you see in Kaiju movies… it’s not a complaint I’m actually completely fine with this) and an okay amount of okay attack options, but every level is the same thing with the same combat scenarios over and over, there’s barely any level design, and not much going on other than the fact that it’s a super cool concept that’s executed okay-ish. I like what it’s doing, but I wish it did it a bit better.

I’d recommend this one at a good discount only, as there are lots of much better recent beat ’em ups like Streets of Rage 4 or River City Girls or the Kunio-kun + Double Dragon collection. Get those before getting this one.

Right?

I mean, it’s a faithful remake of the old one. It has some new post-game stuff you probably won’t care about. It has the Grand Underground which is pretty meh so far. It has EXP Share, either you like that (like I do) or don’t. And it has no need to use pokemon for HMs, so you can have a full team at all times (which means you don’t need to evolve your bidoof anymore, and keep it in its godly state). Not really much to say about it, you already know, right now, if it interests you. Not worth my time to review it. I WILL review Legends though.

So, fuck it, I’m not reviewing it.

Did the Nuzlocke thing (up until Pokemon League, where I just kept trying over and over with the underleveled team I had at the time), it went okay. That Jirachi might look like overkill (and is probably against some of the rules people use, I had to take an executive decision late in the game to have anything on my team), but it was level 48 when I started the Elite 4, so he was basically useless (in fact everything here was below level 55 when I went in, except for Skuntank). And the first 2 members would wreck me because I had bad weaknesses to most of their pokemon, lul. Also didn’t implement many rulings for the Grand Underground, my final decision was to use only the first fossil I found and nothing else, which ended up being a cranidos that died early lol.

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?

I was interested in this game when it was announced. Pretty simple reason: it’s made by People Can Fly, the same people that made Painkiller and Bulletstorm. So they have a pretty good track record for great games, Bulletstorm being one of my favorite non-DOOM FPS games.

But quickly red flags were showing up for this game. It just… looked strange. It finally ended up getting a demo. That demo… removed all possible hype for me. But I did notice some people saying it was good, and it’s possible that I just chose a character class that’s not fun to play. So with the current Epic Game Store sale and the constant 10$ coupon during the duration of the sale, this ended up being half-price. So I figured on friday that I’d grab it and it’d be my long-weekend game (it was Victoria Day weekend in Canada). And boy do I feel like I wasted my time.

Let’s go and talk about why! No, this is not a review because I’m not done with it, and I don’t want to play any more of it. If you want to treat this as a review go right ahead because this is the closest I’ll get to it.