The Ascent is the first game by Neon Giant, and presents a dystopian Cyberpunk world for you to indulge in. It’s third-person perspective gunplay mixed with RPG elements sets out to create a unique dark future fantasy adventure, but does it stick the landing?
The Ascent
Developer: Neon Giant
Price: $30 USD
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
You ever run into a game that you should be all means enjoy, but it just doesn’t click? Listen, apparently by my playtime in Cyberpunk 2077 last year, I love a dystopian romp through a Cyberpunk landscape that is held together with digital duct tape. But somehow, I bounced so hard off The Ascent that it left a bad taste in my mouth and a wish that it spent another few more months in the oven. The game comes out pretty strong, but quickly you start to see the issues arise, the gameplay stagnates and it all kind of falls apart.
The Ascent is a top-down twin-stick style shooter with some action RPG elements set in a dark future world where the vast majority of individuals are essentially owned by the massive mega-corporations, indentured servants paying off a life debt for little and big reasons. The whole life you know depends on the set cycle established by the corporations, a delicate system of checks and balances to provide at least some necessities of life for the things living within it. But “good” things can’t last forever, can they? The game opens up with the system failing as chaos ensues across the Ascent Group, and of course you get wrapped up in all of it! Will you be able to track down what caused this series of events, or allow the district to crumble around you?
Gameplay wise, one of the big things going on is that you can aim high or low, allowing you to use cover even from a more isometric viewing angle. Smaller enemies can’t be hit if you are standing and aiming high, just like enemies can miss you when you crouch during a firefight, double effective if you are using some cover to protect you from low shots. Playing on the normal difficulty, I actually liked the difficulty presented in this game as long as you are within your level range of combat encounters. You can quickly get shredded if you don’t take advantage of cover in an encounter, and enemies will often flank you or try to draw you out of cover with grenades and other abilities. Solo or Co-op will really change the way you approach encounters since you can also flank enemies, or employ clever combinations of weapons, items or powers to tip the scales in your favor.
Speaking of those, you can equip different gadgets and cyberware powers to give you things as basic as a strong punch, or a frag grenade to more Cyberpunk appropriate things like fields that slow bullets or grenades that generate tiny black holes to crush everything around them. The effects of these, and other attributes can be leveled up with skill points, or equipment can also affect a wide variety of different stats so you can be a jack of all trades, or min max to your heart’s content.
All of this sounds good, like a solid foundation for something put some hours into. But man, my experience had me being sent to waypoints that didn’t exist, waypoints deep in the territory of level 20 enemies (this is a level 2 or 3 sidequest mind you) that I basically ran through like a chicken with its head cut off, dying repeatedly just to get to an elevator that wouldn’t operate, waypoint proudly on top of it. Long stretches of running through nearly barren land between areas might get you looking at some cool scenery the first time, but it all starts to melt together as most of the areas I experienced all used a similar color palette or visual style. I would constantly get caught on very small (or even invisible in some cases) pieces of the environment, leaving me stuck there to restart or pray an enemy would show up and maybe displace my character model by force.
I went into this experience excited and positive for some more awesome Cyberpunk worlds, technology, and lore and just quickly found myself frustrated with the game’s inability to stick the landing. There are lots of things to like about this game in a vacuum, but when it all comes together to try and do its thing, it starts to fall short quickly and fails to provide you with many compelling reasons to continue with it.
The Final Word
The Ascent is better with friends, and its inclusion on Game Pass can give you a guilt-free way to give it a try and see if it resonates with you, but for this Cyberpunk fan, I was not able to find something to keep me playing and interested some other similarly flawed games within the Cyberpunk genre of settings. I am hoping this small team continues to polish and improve this title because it really feels like it needs another chunk of time in the oven to have it ready for the world, and with that, it could provide a more engaging experience with more staying power overall.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
