THE ASCENT
C-beams glitter in the dark
THE INTRO TO BLADE RUNNER, but with way more shooting, seems to be the elevator pitch here, and it works extremely well. As an indentured laborer on the planet Veres, paying off the cost of your new life on the off-world colony with your body, you are at the bottom of the pile. Quite literally. They call it the Deepstink, and you’re sent down on a new-character-inan-RPG mission to reset the computer that’s not clearing the sewage so your betters, who live higher up the arcology, aren't showering in manure. You need somewhere to ascend from, after all.
LOCKDOWN MISSION
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous. This early mission is straightforward enough—you go in with your gun, blast a few ferals, hack a few doors, watch some robots at work, reset the computer’s memory. It was a bit like getting back into the MaximumPC office after Covid lockdown was lifted.
Shooting is a twin-stick affair, the left one handling character movement while the right controls shooting direction. The camera is fixed, which can occasionally mean some higher part of the level getting in the way, but rarely. There’s a dodgeroll to get you out of packs of meleeonly enemies and dodge the telegraphed incoming artillery fire, but most of the time you’ll just have that trigger clamped down as you dance your laser sight across the pack that’s running at you.
There’s a cover system, mastery of which is key to combat, but early opportunities are few. So many fights turn into a procession, running backward while kiting a few ferals that mindlessly run at you. The first time you encounter a boss it’s in an open donut-shaped arena with few places to hide. The cover does come, as pieces of the disintegrating superstructure come to your aid.
The ability to aim high, shooting above the heads of smaller enemies and over cover too, comes in handy with larger bad guys, especially as it has a chance to stagger them, and lurking at the bottom of a staircase is a great way to set up a killing ground. The game can be played solo, or in co-op with three others, including a wonderful couch co-op mode which is perfect for the game. Combat is fun, but not exactly subtle, largely becoming a case of how much damage you can send the enemies’ way while mitigating the effects of what comes back the other way.
The hyper-urban futuristic setting has more than a whiff of Games Workshop’s
Necromunda about it, as well as the neon-in-the-darkness of BladeRunner. There’s some William Gibson too, and just about any 1980s sci-fi that imagined a high-tech future that still used CRT screens. It’s hugely detailed, with every level consisting of a critical path and an absolute mountain of stuff that’s not on it, but exists to draw your eye. Robots weld in the dark, lighting themselves (and often more interesting things too) with showers of intermittent sparks. Bodies lay huddled at the edges of walkways, the ‘Investigate’ prompt unleashing a kick that rattles currency free.
GETTING YOUR KICKS
Trampling all over boxes and crates breaks them to reveal loot left inside, exposing a playful physics engine that sees you knock chairs flying and kick the bodies of enemies a surprisingly long way after you’ve downed them. Health drops are common enough, at least in the beginning before the cover has asserted itself, that pray-and-spray tactics are perfectly suitable, especially once you’ve picked up a fully automatic weapon, which doesn’t take long. Being an action RPG, there are few places you go that won’t dissolve into a fight of some sort, the
loot you scoop up coming in handy during downtime between scraps when you can upgrade everything from your gun to yourself. Leveling up gains you skill points, which can be spent to improve your weapon handling and maximum health, among other attributes.
Running in 4K with ray-tracing enabled on our RTX 3080, this contrast of darkness and bursts of lighting, often in motion thanks to the numerous fans bringing fresh air to the fetid, can be a remarkable-looking place to explore. When not covered in trash, the floor shines a dull metallic gray, and anywhere with shop fronts demands you to keep still and take it all in. It’s a shame that you have to keep moving, as it’s in the stillness that the extent of the environmental art and imagination makes itself known. Later levels, in cleaner, better-lit parts of the towering city, are almost an anticlimax following the gritty nocturnality of the game’s opening.
Your ascent from this sewageclogged hell depends upon you becoming a hired gun for the gang leaders and other characters you encounter. It’s here that TheAscent’s weaknesses start to show themselves. The writing is by turns sophomore sniggering and banal grunting that has you reaching for the skip button. Then there’s the unchanging grimness of everything—even as you ascend the tower, the stench of corruption never really leaves, it just changes form. Add to this the fact that shooting is your only way through, there’s no way to use the skill tree to create a stealth character or a hacker, and the whole artifice can begin to feel a little hollow, like a set that might come crashing down at any moment.
The sparks, neon, and laser rangefinders of TheAscent may be spectacular in contrast to the darkness of the opening levels, but that spicy heterogeneity, along with the solid shooting, isn’t quite as compelling as the game moves into its middle section. It's fun in single-player mode and a blast in co-op, but this cyberpunk fantasy doesn’t quite retain your interest all the way to its beautifully lit elevators.
VERDICT 7 The Ascent
ASCEND Gorgeous to look at; a rampaging cyberpunk looter
shooter.
DESCEND Dialog can be a turn-off; relentlessly grim; much backtracking.
RECOMMENDED SPECS CPU, i7-6700K / Ryzen 5 2600. RAM, 16GB.
GPU, GTX 1070 / RX 5700.
$29.99/Gamepass, www.curve-digital.com