The Ascent
THE ASCENT is a quality action-RPG set in a mind-blowing cyberpunk city
Along with thousands of other galactic migrants, your character in The Ascent pays a small fortune for a ticket to the planet Veles, looking for a better life. The moment you step off the ship, however, the price of the ticket becomes a debt so astronomical that you’ll die before you can pay it off.
Even so, the company that owns the city you now call home, the Ascent Group, wants its pound of flesh. You are now an indent—slang for an indentured servant—working dirty, dangerous jobs to pay it off.
The Ascent’s setting, a mix of neon-flecked ’80s cyberpunk and grimy science fiction, is magnificent. The story takes place in an Arcology—a self-contained city squeezed into an immense skyscraper.
Think Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, crossed with Akira’s Neo Tokyo, and populated by the aliens from the Mos Eisley cantina. It’s an urban crush of tight-knit markets, bustling plazas, and concrete valleys buzzing with streams of flying cars.
It’s a hell of a setting, and one of the most compelling cyberpunk worlds on PC. But what do you actually do in it? Well, The Ascent is an action-RPG, with an emphasis on the action, that you can play alone or with up to three friends in co-op.
It’s a gloriously chunky, brutal isometric shooter where you run around that gorgeous city blowing enemies away with shotguns and churning them into a fine bloody mist with rattly machineguns. Loot, money, and power-ups sprinkle out of their corpses, and scooping these up provides a constant stream of tiny, pleasing dopamine hits.
Loot comes in the form of weapons and various bits of cyberpunk-themed armor to play dress-up with, including glowing visors and mechanical limbs.
Playing with a mouse and keyboard, it’s WASD to move, mouse to aim. With a gamepad, it’s a twin-stick shooter. Both work well, but the extra precision of the mouse aiming just clinched it for me.
Crouch behind something and you can raise your gun with the left trigger or the right mouse button, shooting over the top of whichever chunk of debris you happen to be squatting near. If you double tap the spacebar (or A button) you can evade enemies with a fast roll. All these elements combine to create a really great-feeling shooter that involves more than just pointing and blasting.
UP AND COMING
Don’t be fooled by the existence of a cover system: The relentless rhythm of The Ascent’s combat forces you to be in near-constant motion. Guntoting enemies are accompanied by large groups of melee grunts. They push forward aggressively, never giving you a chance to get settled or get too comfortable behind cover.
When you begin the game, your lowly indent is working a job in the Deepstink, the lowest part of the city. But as you make a name for yourself, working as a mercenary for an influential crime boss, you find yourself rising to the top—literally.
One of the most compelling cyberpunk worlds on PC
The story takes you from the stinking depths of the Arcology to increasingly higher, more opulent levels, all of which have a very different aesthetic and vibe.
This is fundamentally a game about shooting lots of people dead, including gangsters, corporate soldiers, and hulking mechs. But there are some quiet moments too. In crowded social hubs you can shop, talk to NPCs, and pick up sidequests without fear of being attacked.
I had issues with sudden, sharp difficulty spikes, some of which forced me to break off from the story and grind sidequests to level up. I wouldn’t mind this if the sidequests were consistently good, but I found them pretty hit and miss.
Some keep you hooked with a good story. But others feel a little like busywork, with a lot of walking long distances between districts.
But whenever the game does something to disappoint me, the world always wins me back. From the lavish Golden Satori casino to the bleak Black Lake slums, this is a masterclass in creating a sense of place. The Ascent is a superb shooter elevated by a great setting. ■