REVIEW : The Ascent (PS5)
The Ascent is a cyberpunk-themed action role-playing game that may be played solo or cooperatively. The Ascent Group, the megacorporation that owns you and everyone else, has just gone bankrupt. Confusion and anarchy erupt, security and order are disrupted, and everyone is left to fend for themselves without protection. Stop gangs and hostile corporations from seizing control and learn the truth. While it looks great in some parts and the shooting is good – especially in multiplayer – other design decisions let it down. To begin with, it necessitates a lot of walking between missions, and your character isn’t exactly quick. It also had several fairly high difficulty spikes, resulting in an inconsistent experience.
I played it on PC, thus I had a rather pleasant experience in terms of performance. And, to be honest, some of the backdrops are just breathtaking. The Ascent has finally arrived on PS5, almost a year after its initial release – but how much has changed, and how much have the modifications improved things? To address the first question, there isn’t much. There were various bug fixes and tweaks in the previous edition, which have been carried over. Some of the difficulty appears to be more balanced, but it could be due to practise. I didn’t detect any graphics enhancements or changes when I returned to Veles’ dismal world. It already looked great, and the PS5’s power wasn’t going to make it any better.
Your mission, as you may have guessed, is to strap in, form some alliances, and blast your way through The Ascent in order to ensure your own survival and unearth the mystery surrounding the arcology’s unexpected collapse. It’s on to the character creation suite after learning the plot that serves as the foundation for The Ascent’s twin-stick shooter antics. Character creation, on the other hand, exists mainly for cosmetic purposes in The Ascent, and while the lack of classes is an omission to some extent, the character development system nonetheless allows you to create some badass-looking characters.
Once you’ve gotten into the game, you’ll spend your time wandering around the arcology from an elevated isometric perspective, blasting fools, completing side missions, collecting ‘Ucreds’ to upgrade and purchase new gear, and looting incrementally better weapons and gear from the dead bodies of your progressively stronger begun to fall foes.
Though The Ascent lacks a class structure, it does have a solid, if overly familiar, progression system that allows you to level up and invest experience points in things like more hit points, better critical damage chance, and so on, while the capacity to enhance your personality with a variety of passive and active skills adds even more context for constructive advancement and character development.
However, there is now a cosmetic system. You can apply skins to your armour at a store in the hubs based on other items you’ve discovered. This may appear to be a minor detail, but it is a much-desired feature. The armour design was one of my greatest gripes with The Ascent. In a cyberpunk environment, it’s not difficult to make a player character seem badass, but the main character in The Ascent looked like they’d swallowed a high-powered magnet and been dragged through a scrapyard. At the very least, that element can now be controlled.
However, it’s possible that I missed the point the first time around. Perhaps the lesson is that anyone can become a badass super-soldier – especially when you’re obliged to do it on a regular basis. The tale doesn’t do much with the setting, but it does a decent job of giving you adversaries to despise and destroy.
You spend almost as much time dashing about the breathtakingly beautiful overworld as you do in the much less attractive underground tunnels. The sheer amount of detail in some of the backdrops on display in the former is enough to make you stop and marvel. The missions, on the other hand, are frequently carried out in tighter, more enclosed spaces. Although it can’t be all glitz and glam all of the time, the contrast is striking.
The Ascent’s moment-to-moment fighting is really satisfying to say the least, and it’s much more than simply a gorgeous face (more on that later).Starting with the gunplay, every gun you’ll fire in the Ascent sounds and feels amazing, from pistols to shotguns to energy weapons and everything in between. To be honest, the gun sounds are so good that I’ll sometimes fire my weapon at nothing just to hear the thrum and roar of my picked firearm doing its murder rattle, while the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback kicks back with the proper feedback relying on the gun presently being discharged. It’s just fantastic.
Beyond the surface layer of battle, The Ascent follows a familiar pattern, with your character able to use a variety of skills in addition to a variety of weaponry to complete missions. The Ascent also has a protection system that enables you to conceal behind items in the world to avoid incoming damage while also returning fire from cover.
The rhythm of The Ascent’s action, or, in some situations, the absence thereof, is where it falls short in this aspect. When trying to tackle the various foes, some of whom appear in the gameplay as you access new areas, and others who are occasionally basically decided to drop in next to oneself by a moving car overhead, it quickly became obvious that the enemies aren’t particularly intelligent, with many of them simply charging at you without taking advantage of cover or flanking possibilities in the surroundings.
Another concern is the way in which health is dealt with. Because your health does not regenerate during fight, you’ll need to collect health pickups from your vanquished adversaries’ broken bodies, while adjacent item terminals also let you trade precious Ucreds for comparable health restoring items.
