
“We’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.”īut like the cities of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, the skyscrapers may be pristine and glorious, but it’s in the foundations where some ugliness lies. Waltz into town and you just want to stop and take it all in, in all of its Blade Runner glory. When the combat sings and you’re backed into a corner with a co-op partner, dispatching wave after wave of Turbo Vipers, it can feel like a neuromancer’s dream. The Ascent is a tough game to score, because the peaks are so skyscraper-high. As is perhaps appropriate for a game focused on the exploitation of workers, The Ascent can occasionally feel like makework and – dare we say – tedious.īut but but. The Ascent attempts the age-old trick of bringing back bosses and harder enemies, recycling them in different scenarios or just stacking them up together. The pacing slips and slides all over the shop, and there were moments where we were stuck grinding when we didn’t want to be. Guns in particular have a wide arsenal, and you can merrily try out two in quick succession with one being terrible and the other being supremely powerful.īut it’s the repetition that’s the most disappointing.
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That’s not to say the progression systems are poor: we found the many ways to upgrade your character to be deep, and most improvements were clearly felt on the character. But replaying the same sequence three or four times is common, and you will need patience, a willingness to master the cover system, and constantly keep on top of your upgrading (armour didn’t seem to have as much of an impact).

We just about stayed on the brink of its difficulty, never quite feeling like it was unfair. But where The Ascent stumbles is in its difficulty, and it falls fully over with its repetition. The Ascent achieves the holy grail of making you look spectacular when you’re mostly winging it. Then you’ll emerge and land a punch that takes out five on the trot. It all becomes so second nature, rolling away from enemy AOE, crouching behind a wall, and firing over the top as enemies chip away at the cover. It’s all a bit grimdark and serious, and some more humour would have done wonders. You get promoted and your boss might change up, but the back-of-the-envelope synopsis for each mission mostly remains the same. But in the second half of The Ascent, all your character does is get sent on missions to protect or retrieve assets. Initially, it sounds so, so good, like Brexit gone haywire, and it manages to make corporate warfare seem bombastic. Bandits, thieves and opportunist corporations raid the shell for workers, resources and equipment. But the shareholders of The Ascent Group go AWOL, forming the mystery at the heart of The Ascent, which triggers a mixture of bankruptcy and coup. You are an Indent, a contracted worker to The Ascent Group on the planet Veles, and you’re something of a Grant Mitchell type as you do the henchperson work. The story, for example, keeps escalating rather than developing into something new. The Ascent’s foibles are less pronounced in co-op too (more on that in a mo), making it undeniably the best way to play.
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It’s smooth as butter here, and – while we weren’t able to play the full campaign with a partner – it was always easy to drop in and cut through enemies together. Then there’s the ability to play co-op with four players, both online and on your couch. Combat is supremely dynamic, with a cover system that flips the bird to Gears of War, abandoning the plodding cover-lock system for a ‘shoot over cover’ button which is whippet-fast. Hacking opportunities litter the world, but you just need to press the Y button in their vicinity and they all pop open. Walk into crates and they pop open, with you auto-looting the bounty.

The best twin-stickers are super-fast, and Neon Giant makes sure that the RPG baggage is filed smooth. The Ascent shows that the genre can map neatly onto the bones of a Diablo-a-like and work wonders.Įverything’s then buffed to a sheen. Most twin-stickers are arcadey and throwaway, but we’d always harboured a sense that it didn’t have to be that way. The mix of genres works an absolute treat. But rather than be a more conventional hack-and-slash, The Ascent opts to be a twin-stick shooter. You’re traipsing into areas and mowing down waves of mobs, pocketing all the loot and scanning the environment for chests. Diablo has always had a moreish structure and The Ascent hews close. There is no doubting where Neon Giant is pitching the gameplay, too, and we were absolutely down with it.
