The Ascent - isometric, co-op cyberpunk action RPG

[cyborgboy95]

 

[toro]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/979690/discussions/0/3104647961283144377/

There are a few threads tackling this topic. TL;DR. There's no infinite and growing end-game. You can join friends games with your character and choose if there's additional content you want to play.

Edit: It's a stupid Diablo clone. Meh. I'll take it.

 

[luj1]

im so tired of sci fi shit

It's not sci fi I'm tired of, it's derivative looking sci fi (like this).

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[Tavar]

I'm a bit worried about all this emphasize on cover, but it still looks interesting. Need to play it to make up my mind, though. It is very difficult to judge this kind of game based on trailers.

 

[Oracsbox]

This doesn't look utter shit... small team, commitment to the project, could actually be good. I shall play it and see.

I am however disgusted by creative director, Arcade Bergs haircut

 

[Ruchy]

Might be a quick coop lark with some close friends, a beer and pretzels type of game and I'm ok with that.

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

One Cyberpunk is enough for decade. Wake up samurai we have decline to burn.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-07-28-the-ascent-review

The Ascent review - a breathtaking cyberpunk world in thrall to a tedious RPG-shooter
Social climber.

The Ascent's arcology setting is splendid, if heavily derivative - shame that all you can do here is gun and grind.

The Ascent teems. Its tiered alien megacity is one of the liveliest cyberpunk settings I've explored, always crawling with people and machines, whether you're massacring mutants in the sewers or gazing out from a boardroom window. Admittedly, it also teems with cliches and callouts to the usual canonical works: William Gibson's phrase "high tech, low life", which flickers on displays throughout like a sorcerer's incantation; Blade Runner's flourescent umbrella handles and melancholy synth score; pirouetting holostrippers from any number of seedy sci-fi saloons; an Oriental faction who worship honour and wield katanas. This is not one of your transgressive, norm-busting punk fictions - even Ruiner, its closest cousin, is a bolt from the blue by comparison. But what The Ascent's world lacks in imagination and bite it almost makes up for in scale and an exhaustive, model-maker's commitment to the fine details.

The elevated diagonal perspective does a lot of work here, producing a landscape of corners that split the setting into lush, contrasting arrangements of colours and textures. There's a base level of visual fascination to the way floor patterns and buildings map to, or tug against the axes of shooting and exploration suggested by the quasi-isometric viewpoint. The vertical city premise is a bit sleight-of-hand: the world is functionally a series of flat planes linked by loading transitions, one that doesn't even see the need for a jump button. But the game ably cultivates the impression of colossal depth. Chance gaps and reinforced glass floors offer giddy views of hovercars slicing through disorderly canyons of tenements and factories, hundreds of metres beneath. Some of these depths can be accessed by elevator or floating platform - transitions reminiscent of Abe's Oddysee's fore-to-background shifts - but enormous effort has been spent bringing life to places that can't be reached. You'll spot showers of sparks from droids fixing the flanks of walkways, and balconies stuffed with party-goers, just above the navigable plane.

So what do you do in this astonishing setting - the work, would you believe, of just 11 developers? Having blown three paragraphs raving about kiosks, let me see if I can cram everything into a sentence: follow HUD prompts to a quest marker, circle-strafe away from attackers till everybody is toast, spend your level-up points and make for the next objective, perhaps stopping en-route to upgrade or sell off some gear if you pass a vendor. That's the game. OK, not quite: there's also hacking, but it's a glorified gating feature/back-tracking incentive, with beefier cyberdecks letting you crack encrypted treasure chests and disable the forcefields that separate city districts.

It's a horrible waste of a setting. It's also a waste of a story. The writing is routine cyberpunk fare: overcompensatory c0rpoSlang and edgy self-interest, with characters ranging from a permanently apoplectic crimeworld boss to a wintry mercenary captain - Hitman's Diana Burnwood after a trip to the ripperdoc. Characters aren't so much personalities as grab-bags of attitudes harvested from TVtropes. But the narrative premise is quite intriguing. Most of The Ascent's citizens are indents, interplanetary pioneers who must now spend their whole lives paying off the cost of a travel. As the game begins, the corporation running the arcology has mysteriously gone bankrupt, which means that everybody's contracts are in limbo, together with ownership of utilities such as the AIs and power generators at the bottom of the world.

It's a breath of possibility in a place that has operated for decades as an overblown debtor's prison, cue hushed conversations in the streets between burned-out labourers who once dreamed of building paradise. There's little expectation of positive change - everybody understands from the off that some or other big firm will eventually seize control. Most would prefer it that way: "business as usual" has an appealing ring, after all, when the plumbing stops working, to say nothing of gangs making inroads against a suddenly defunded corporate police. But still, this opening note of uncertainty, the rocking of a world founded on punitive debt, seems a strong foundation for a story about the dynamics of a perilously relatable capitalist dystopia. So it's a bit of a shame that your role in the game is that of a self-aware bludgeoning instrument, a moody, voiceless grunt who is largely content to follow the orders of whoever is in a position to give them.

You could argue that the brute simplicity of The Ascent's shooting and levelling makes it a solid, unobtrusive delivery system for the city's nuances. This falls over quickly, however, because the shooting isn't all that good, and the RPG stuff is a bland process of attrition and back-tracking that gradually makes roving the metropolis a chore. As a shooter, The Ascent does have some distinctive ideas: it walks an uneasy line between tactical combat in the Gears tradition and Diablo-tinted bullet-hell evasion. It handles like a twin-stick shmup, with a laser pointer and adjustable autoaim, but you can crouch and hold left trigger to fire over cover. You shoot from the hip by default, but you can also put your weapon to your shoulder by holding left trigger to boost the odds of a critical hit at the expense of movement speed.

The idea, I think, is to create a thrilling alternation between sliding around blasting like you're playing Geometry Wars and surgically resolving an encounter like you're playing Ghost Recon. But it doesn't really hang together, in the absence of co-op partners at least. The restricted viewpoint together with the game's tendency to spawn goons from all angles means that you seldom have the luxury of digging in. Given the sheer amount going on in any given scene, it's easy to lose track of whether you're crouched or standing, whether your bullets are hitting an enemy or shredding the barricade in front of you. So you stick to frenzied evasion, backing into health drops while kiting the hordes around cover layouts. You don't have to worry about ammo, at least: the guns, from energy rifles to rocket launchers, have different reloading times and magazine sizes but are usefully inexhaustible.

One late game experience experience put me in mind of pitching a tent after dark while being eaten alive by mosquitos.

Level differences are, in any case, sturdier defences than either walls or your dodge-roll: polish off a couple of sidequests per main story beat, and you can generally wade through everything firing a handcannon point-blank, even if you forget to pick the best attack type (energy-based, ballistic, etc) for the enemy in question. You can also grind by butting your head against story missions, as XP from kills carries over between deaths, providing you don't mind listening to the same limp mission dialogue again and again.

The biggest exceptions to the Rule of Grind are the annoying timed wave-defence scenarios that close out many of the story missions. Later on, The Ascent becomes an absolute meat factory, with enemies turfing up in groups of 10 or more. One lategame clash sees you activating four hold-the-button terminals in succession while mutants pour into a low-lit area, an experience that put me in mind of pitching a tent after dark while being eaten alive by mosquitos. You can summon robot allies to draw off some punishment, but it's no substitute for another flesh-and-blood player at your side. While The Ascent can be played solo throughout, these pressure cooker moments are an unsubtle nudge towards the multiplayer support - there's public or invitation-only online and, whisper it, a local co-op feature I look forward to trying out on console. Sadly, pre-launch review conditions and lockdown restrictions meant I wasn't able to organise any team-ups during my 20 hours with the game.

It wouldn't be a cyberpunk story without body mods, but these are just familiar action-RPG power-ups with a Deus Ex wrapper. Augs include AOE strikes and the obligatory Iron-Man chest beam, deployable turrets and support skills that leach health or bump foes into stasis. They complement the run-and-gun well enough, often turning the tide of a brawl, but they're deeply unexciting and don't blend into anything more than the sum of their parts. Upgrading your character stats (think odds of critical hit, health bar, and resistance to stagger) boosts the associated augments, which generates a bit of strategic tension between enhancing attributes or abilities, but there's not much in the way of battlefield combos beyond bread-and-butter RPG alchemy such as priming opponents to explode when they die. The enemy design is just as routine, toying with static defences and hackers who debuff you, but defaulting mostly to riflemen who pin you down and kamikaze dudes who flush you out. Bosses are just bigger health bars with louder AOE skills: you'll scurry away from them, like Monty Python's unwilling gladiator, till they keel over from sheer frustration.

Spoiler

And then there are the technical problems. I hesitate to bring down the hammer here, because my PC is on the rickety side, but if my hardware can run a game on med-high settings it ought to be able to run it without continual crashing, characters getting stuck on the geometry, whole stretches of floorplan taking a moment to load in, and worst of all, special abilities bugging out during combat. At one point the zip of hover traffic kept interfering with the sound of power generators, producing a cacophony suggestive of a lightsaber duel in a washing machine. An hour or so later, the fire button stopped working. Thankfully, these issues apply to enemies too: words cannot express the gratitude I felt towards the finish when an attacking posse abruptly downed tools and sat there, eyeballing me, seemingly as tired of it all as I was.

The more you play, conquering the arcology's upper tiers and toppling its kingpins, the less enthralling this marvelous city becomes. Quests drag you back and forth between far-flung NPCs, your journey interrupted every few seconds by hoodlums arbitrarily defending bits of floor. There's fast travel in the shape of free metro stations and airborne taxis that can be summoned for a negligible fee, but you can only use the central elevators to travel between arcology tiers, which creates more legwork and more opportunities for boring fights. Worst of all, there's no fast travelling from the maintenance districts, docks, plants and factories that account for a majority of dungeons, so if you reach a boss you're under-levelled for and need to juice up your gear, you'll need to trek all the way back to the hub.

Still, it's a relief to return from these gruelling engagements to the major population centres, exploring not so much for sidequests as for fresh sights and sounds, new ways for the setting to express itself. Aliens pumping iron in open air gyms. People mopping up - the RPG bystander's favourite pastime - or kicking vending machines. Club goers throwing shapes (there's a shoot-out that recalls the opening scene from Blade) and drunks wobbling back to the bar. Scientists debating in amongst gleaming centrifuges. All these moving parts sink into the memory where the game's combat and quest elements soon blur into slurry.

By contrast, the world doesn't seem to remember you, for all your burgeoning firepower and tooled-up appearance. Pop off a round and pedestrians scatter, but seconds later it's as if nothing has happened. Respawning gangs prove oblivious to your growing track record for murder. "Want to meet your dead relatives?" they'll squeak, a level 4 to your 20, waggling their dukes like Scrappy Doo squaring up to the Terminator. There's the suggestion of repercussions for killing civilians - the aforesaid wintry mercenary captain will give you an earful about it over the radio. But they never materialise in-game - or at least, they never did for me. Rather than allusions to a morality system a la Fallout, these reprimands come to feel like Call of Duty's hypocritical slaps on the wrist for friendly fire.

NPCs do occasionally remark on your antics as you pass - you'll hear news broadcasts during trips from tier to tier about recent acts of mass destruction - and you'll inevitably determine the city's broad fate in the course of the plot. But your status, reputation and choices are never seriously reflected in the chemistry of the spaces you visit, the people you meet. And why would they care? After all, you're just another thug looking to own the universe, grinding your way up that much-coveted boardroom view. To quote Gibson again, "the street finds its own uses for things". I'm not sure The Ascent's streets have much use for the player.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/the-ascent-review/

THE ASCENT REVIEW
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 probably die before you can pay it off. Even so, the company that owns the massive city you now call home, the Ascent Group, wants its pound of flesh. You are now an indent—slang for an indentured labourer—working dirty, dangerous jobs to pay it off. So much for a better life. Those advertising blimps in Blade Runner were full of shit.

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—and it's obscene with detail. Think Hong Kong's infamous Kowloon Walled City, crossed with Akira's Neo Tokyo, and populated by the scuzzy aliens from the Mos Eisley cantina. It's a dazzling urban crush of tight-knit markets, bustling plazas, cavernous concrete valleys buzzing with streams of flying cars, and colossal neon billboards casting coloured light over the cluttered, teeming streets.

But what really makes the setting special is how detailed it is on a micro level too. A location called Coder's Cove—a hacker hideout hidden in a flooded part of the city—is a perfect example of this, with its ramshackle stacks of computer monitors, tangled cables snaking across the floor, hackers tapping away at keyboards, graffiti-splattered walls, and beat-up leather couches. Every location you visit, from convenience stores, to casinos, to nightclubs, to gun shops, is crammed with this kind of intricate, painstaking detail.

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 either play alone or with up to three friends in co-op. It's a gloriously chunky, brutal isometric shooter where you strafe and roll around that gorgeous city, blowing enemies away with shotguns, exploding them with grenades, or churning them into a fine bloody mist with rattly machine-guns. Occasionally, sparkling loot, money, and power-ups will sprinkle out of their jelly-limbed 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 armour to play dress-up with, including glowing visors and mechanical limbs. You can create some pretty cool (and wild) looking characters, although overall there isn't as much loot variety as, say, Diablo. The Ascent has a lot in common with Blizzard's action RPG, specifically the crunchy feel of the combat, the way your character is constantly growing stronger, and the isometric camera. But it's much more authored. There are no random dungeons here: every inch of the Arcology, and everything you do there, is hand-crafted.

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—especially late in the game when a comical number of enemies are thrown at you. You can also install augmentations, including a hydraulic arm that allows you to punch people so hard their body dissolves into a twinkling cloud of person-shaped dust. Another aug lets you mark certain enemies so that they explode when they die, basically letting you create fleshy explosive barrels on the fly.

Cover is a factor too. 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 ultra-detailed debris you happen to be squatting near. If you double tap the spacebar (or A button) you can evade enemies with a fast roll, which works on a cooldown timer. All these elements combine to create a really great-feeling shooter that involves more than just pointing and shooting. Enemies come thick and fast, and thinking about where you're moving in these dense, messy environments is as important as having a good aim.

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. Gun-toting enemies are accompanied by large groups of melee grunts wielding katanas, pipes, knives, and other painful-looking weapons. They push forward aggressively, never giving you a chance to get settled or get too comfortable behind cover, which can be exhausting sometimes. I spent the majority of the game running backwards, kiting enemies. Later, a class of enemy shows up who can drop offensive gadgets including mortar launchers, complicating things further.

When you begin the game, your lowly indent—who you create yourself from a fairly limited selection of faces, haircuts, and tattoos—is working a job in the Deepstink, the lowest part of the city. This grim industrial abyss is dark, claustrophobic, and crawling with bitey creatures called Ferals. But as you make a name for yourself, working as a mercenary for an influential crime boss, you find yourself rising to the top—quite literally. 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, augmented aliens, 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. The combat is great, but exploring these areas, I wish The Ascent was more of an RPG. A setting this rich would be a perfect fit for a game in the style of classic Fallout, with deep quests and dialogue. But these safe zone visits, as evocative as they are, are ultimately just a brief pit stop before the action ramps up again.

I also 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, like the one involving a soft drinks company conducting sinister experiments on citizens addicted to their product, keep you hooked with a good story. But others feel a little like busywork, with a lot of walking long distances between districts to perform fairly mundane tasks. The ability to call a taxi or jump on the metro to move between different parts of the Arcology does take some of the sting out of this, but there's still a fair amount of backtracking—with respawning enemies—which can be quite gruelling.

But whenever The Ascent does something to disappoint me, the world always wins me back. From the lavish Golden Satori casino to the bleak, dilapidated Black Lake slums, this is a masterclass in creating a sense of place and establishing an atmosphere. Just be aware that, even though the screenshots might make it look like it's a CRPG similar to something like Shadowrun, it's a fast-paced, challenging, almost arcade-like shooter above all. A city this well-realised perhaps deserves more than that, and I'd love future games to expand on the role-playing aspect. But I can still enjoy The Ascent for what it is: a superb action RPG elevated by an exceptional setting.

THE VERDICT
84

THE ASCENT
A lovingly crafted action RPG with challenging, satisfying gunfights and an extraordinary cyberpunk setting.

 

[Infinitron]

Released:

 

[dragonul09]

This game has some serious issues on pc, I'm playing it on an rtx 3070 and it's fucking awful, micro-stutters every second and when barrels explode the game just hangs for a second. Indie no indie, this shit is just unacceptable. Also the gun mechanics and the feel in general has no impact to it, the character also feels floaty as fuck, it's like a gay ballerina on a ice skate rink. Even older games like Shadowgrounds and Alien Shooters did it better and these are almost 20 year old games.

Don't waste 20 squids on this shit, just buy that 1 dollar gamepass ultimate and you are good to go.

 

[DDZ]

Are you playing in Dx 12 or 11?

 

[mediocrepoet]

ACG and Skillup reviews both talked about issues with DX12 that were to be patched in the future...

 

[dragonul09]

Are you playing in Dx 12 or 11?

I'm playing on Dx 11, but I read on steam that people have some issues with the gamepass version, so i'm going to wait till they sort this out.

 

[DDZ]

I am playing the Gamepass version on a 5700 with everything on Ultra and I only have some microstutter every once in a while, but nothing too bad.

I looks amazing, and controls feel fine too, not floaty like you described. I do hate how fucking small the UI is. I was playing on the couch but moved to the desk because Jesus Christ let me change the UI scale.

I just got out of the lowest level so maybe my performance will tank whenever things in game are starting to look less shitty.

 

[Zombra]

Sounds like a grindy button masher with beauty that only goes skin deep. Removed from wishlist.

 

[DDZ]

The beauty goes pretty deep.

I just had my second CTD now, so I will also be waiting for a patch.

 

[DDZ]

Compression makes it look like a prerendered background from Final Fantasy VII, in game and in motion it looks great.

 

[Rieser]

I'm also experiencing the stuttering, unfortunately. Happens whenever there's a lot of shit going on quickly, like a big explosion. Should hopefully get patched soon enough, but I'm not playing further for now.

The game is a beauty visually though.

 

[toro]

The level design is good, the weapons feel nice but the game is retarded (backtracking galore).

It's not worth 20 potatoes. People should wait for a big discount.

 

[Ivan]

This reminds me a lot of that Kickstarte project Satellite Reign.

Spoiler

While the game does a fantastic job with its cyberpunk window dressing, I got bored of the gameplay loop an hour in. I'm surprised that the devs decided to have you travel through an overworld instead of segmented levels. The traversal is boring and not an efficient means to get you to the action, which is more than solid. The effects are fantastic and the sound design is awesome. I saved up my dosh for the stasis nade and the effect is wonderfully violent, in a Fallout 1 kind of way.

tldr: may be style over substance, will see if I think differently as I get into the mid-game. also, a bit of a shame that this well realized setting is relegated to a twinstick shooter wallpaper. Part of me's already dreaming of a Deus Ex like rpg set here.