Diablo has always had a moreish structure and The Ascent hews close. Maybe cyberpunk is just jinked but The Ascent has clearly failed to raise the bar for the setting or co-op shooters in general.There is no doubting where Neon Giant is pitching the gameplay, too, and we were absolutely down with it. The one-note combat and tedious structure, combined with the lack of matchmaking and classes, makes for a thoroughly unentertaining experience that is all the more frustrating for how incredible it looks and how much potential the basic concept has.
Even ordinary city streets are filled with so much detail it seems literally impossible that the game could’ve been created by such a small team.Īnd yet it’s all for nothing. Sometimes you’ll walk past a vista of giant machinery or a view of the interior of the arcology and it looks absolutely incredible. Not in close-up, but since most of the game uses a fairly distant camera angle the level of detail is astonishing. It’s completely useless to look at, especially in terms of distinguishing between waypoints that are above or below you, and the only reliable way to navigate is by following a trail that appears for a few seconds whenever you press the D-pad, but which often gets confused itself.Īssassin’s Creed Mirage officially announced – proper reveal next weekĬonsidering the team at Neo Giant worked on the likes of Wolfenstein and Gears Of War this is all very disappointing, especially because the graphics are so good. The Ascent has what may be the worst in-game map in modern gaming history.
#The ascent review full#
In fact, it often helps as you come back with full health and enemies don’t.Įven worse is how repetitive the missions are and how much aimless wandering the game involves. The artificial intelligence is terrible though (more than once we beat a horde of overpowered enemies simply by moving backwards and forwards across an invisible line, that their AI had clearly been programmed not to cross) and there’s almost no punishment for death.
The combat is not great, but it does threaten to get interesting during boss battles and there are a few unique twists, such as being able to aim high or low – which comes in handy when dealing with smaller aliens or when crouching behind cover. There is also a local co-option, which offers the best chance of getting some enjoyment out of the game, but anything is more fun with a friend and The Ascent can only claim to sit somewhere between doing the washing up (no, I’ll dry!) and participating in a game of tiddlywinks. So either you convince your friends to play with you (thereby risking that relationship once they discover what a bore the game is) or you just end up playing on your own. Although the biggest problem with the online co-op is that, at least pre-launch, there’s no kind of matchmaking. Your character can be customised both physically and in terms of armour, skills, and various types of augments but there are no character classes and so there’s a good chance that if you do play in co-op everyone will end up with unhelpfully similar builds. There are plenty of different weapons to pick up and upgrade, although only a small percentage of them are distinct enough to be worth swapping between – with a good assault rifle and heavy weapon combo being all you really need.
#The ascent review Pc#
Even using a joypad, it seems obvious everything was designed with the PC in mind and while the combat is okay it has nowhere near the bite of, say, Nex Machina. What this translates to in gameplay terms is endless missions that amount to nothing more than ‘go here and kill these people… and probably a bunch of others along the way’.Īs a twin-stick shooter The Ascent is competent but in no way remarkable. You end up working for most of them in turn, with the implied goal being to reach the top of the arcology to find out the truth of what’s going on – the idea being that the higher up you live the greater your social status.
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