There’s a decent array of punchy guns to pulp your many enemies with, and you’ll also gradually unlock augments which give you powerful abilities on cooldowns powered by an energy resource, as well as special deployables such as shock grenades, turrets and healing fields.
The action-RPG twin-stick shooter hybrid gameplay is definitely the highlight of The Ascent, managing to keep the game more or less on an even keel. A convoluted story that relies on jargonistic technobabble and lacks interesting characters or ideas seals the deal unfortunately, and while it’s clear the developers have constructed a fair bit of lore around the game, you’re going to have to dig around in its Codex if you want to piece it all together, rather than having the game actually present it in any organic fashion.īut this is the cyberpunk future, a morally destitute and lawless wasteland, and that means you get to kill things. It doesn’t help that your mute protagonist has zero sense of purpose or place in the world, and this actually makes it kind of worse you are essentially a mindless killing machine at the whim of whichever corporation or entity is pulling your strings, about as self aware and reflective as a cloned loaf of bread. There are clear inspirations drawn aesthetically from cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner and Total Recall, but it ends up more on par with the bizarre Super Mario Bros film in terms of actually exploring the depth of its subject matter. The Ascent has an intriguing setting, but at the end of the day it trudges down the fairly well-trodden narrative path of corporate slavery and corruption, and doesn’t really have too much of import to say on the subject. With the corporations responsible for arbitrating the debts constantly shifting the goal posts, the best an Indent can hope for is to find a small shred of satisfaction in shared misery with other Indents. Lured by the promise of a better life, Indents end up on Veles by first racking up a sizeable debt for their ticket, a debt they must work off performing dangerous and menial labour in the depths of behemoth megactities housing millions just like them. After a fairly basic character creation section, you are thrust into the shoes of an indentured labourer (affectionately known as Indents) on the planet of Veles.