The Ascent appraisal - a breathtaking cyberpunk world in thrall to a Dull RPG-shooter
The Ascent teems. Its tiered alien megacity is one of the liveliest cyberpunk settings I've looked, 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 New 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 Unhappy synth score; pirouetting holostrippers from any number of seedy sci-fi saloons; an Oriental faction who Love 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 biosphere lacks in imagination and bite it almost makes up for in scale and an exhaustive, toymaker's commitment to the fine details.
Take the shops. It's probably the lockdown talking, but I want to live in them. Seriously, you never saw such shops! Armouries fringed by spinning, wireframe weapons. Soylent-green pharmacies and 24 hour kiosks with the fading aura of an impending hangover. Fortified holes-in-the-wall staffed by philosophical robots. Open air markets of steam, textile and clanking metal. Each store is a pretty little treasure box, the lid peeling away when you step inside - neatly patterned with wares, like chips filling a circuit board. And how around that lighting? Polluted, gauzy, shifting, overwhelming. The arcology's hub districts are a battles royale of adboards and Hangul script, a chaos of screens and reflections filtered over smog, the interweaving paths of delivery drones and the shuffling intimates of hundreds of weary NPCs. It's easy to get lost, even when behindhand the breadcrumb trail laid out by the HUD, and I don't mind one bit. The Ascent's city is catnip for digital flâneurs. It craves to be idled in.
The elevated diagonal perspective does a lot of work here, producing a landscape of corners that snappy the setting into lush, contrasting arrangements of colours and textures. There's a base level of visual fascination to the way inoperative 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 domain 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 grand depth. Chance gaps and reinforced glass floors offer giddy views of hovercars slicing above disorderly canyons of tenements and factories, hundreds of metres below. Some of these depths can be accessed by elevator or floating platform - transitions reminiscent of Abe's Oddysee's fore-to-background attempts - but enormous effort has been spent bringing life to places that can't be became. 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 improbable setting - the work, would you believe, of a dozen developers? Having blown three paragraphs raving throughout kiosks, let me see if I can cram everything into a sentence: behindhand 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 impartial, 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 fancy chests and disable the forcefields that separate city districts.
It's a inappropriate 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 an apoplectic crime boss to a cold mercenary captain - Hitman's Diana Burnwood after a trip to the ripperdoc. These garrulous souls 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 depart. 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 remarkable generators at the bottom of the world.
It's a breath of possibility in a assign 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 creation paradise. There's little expectation of positive change - everybody understands from the off that some or latest big firm will eventually seize control. Most would choose it that way: "business as usual" has an inspiring ring, after all, when the plumbing stops working, to say nothing of gangs decision-exclusive inroads against a suddenly defunded corporate police. But serene, this opening note of uncertainty, the rocking of a domain founded on punitive debt, seems a strong foundation for a story throughout the dynamics of a perilously relatable capitalist dystopia. So it's a bit of a crude that your role in the game is that of a self-aware bludgeoning instrument, a moody, voiceless grunt who is largely content to behindhand the orders of whoever is in a position to give them.
You could argues that the brute simplicity of The Ascent's shooting and levelling complains 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 treat 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 archaic 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 shroud. 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 famous hit at the expense of movement speed.
The idea, I think, is to create a thrilling alternation between sliding about 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 shortage of co-op partners at least. The restricted viewpoint together with the game's tendency to spawn goons from all Wangles means that you seldom have the luxury of digging in. Given the sheer amount causing on in any given scene, it's easy to lose track of whether you're crouched or plan, whether your bullets are hitting an enemy or shredding the enclose in front of you. So you stick to frenzied evasion, backing into health drops while kiting the hordes about 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 understood experience put me in mind of pitching a tent while 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 combine of sidequests per main story beat, and you can generally wade throughout everything firing a handcannon point-blank, even if you forget to pick the best dispute type (energy-based, ballistic, etc) for the enemy in interrogate. You can also grind by butting your head anti story missions, as XP from kills carries over between deaths, providing you don't mind listening to the same limp organization dialogue again and again.
The biggest exceptions to the Rule of Grind are the annoying timed wave-defence scenarios that cessation out many of the story missions. Later on, The Ascent becomes an absolute meat beneficial, with enemies turfing up in groups of 10 or more. One lategame clash sees you activating four hold-the-button terminals in succession after fending off mutants, an experience that put me in mind of bowling 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 above, these pressure cooker moments are an unsubtle nudge towards the multiplayer succor - there's public or invitation-only online and, whisper it, a local co-op feature I look advance to trying out on console. Sadly, pre-launch review words 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 exclusive of 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 succor 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 contracts, 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 effect is equally 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 bigger health bars with louder AOE skills: you'll lope away from them, like Monty Python's unwilling gladiator, till they keel over from sheer frustration.
And then there are the strictly 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 audacious 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 contracts bugging out during combat. At one point the zip of glide 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 prevented working. Thankfully, these issues apply to enemies too: conditions cannot express the gratitude I felt towards the effect 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 gallop interrupted every few seconds by hoodlums arbitrarily defending bits of fuzz. 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 disappear between arcology tiers, which creates more legwork and more opportunities for tedious fights. Worst of all, there's no fast travelling from the maintenance districts, docks, plants and factories that account for a very 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 very population centres, exploring not so much for sidequests as for novel sights and sounds, new ways for the setting to tedious itself. Aliens pumping iron in open air gyms. Family 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 outrageous from Blade) and drunks wobbling back to the bar. Scientists debating in amongst luminous centrifuges. All these moving parts sink into the memory where the game's combat and inquire elements soon blur into slurry.
By dissimilarity, the world doesn't seem to remember you, for all your burgeoning firepower and tooled-up impression. Pop off a round and pedestrians scatter, but seconds later it's as if nothing has existed. Respawning gangs prove oblivious to your growing track recount 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 frosty 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 rules a la Fallout, these reprimands come to feel like Call of Duty's hypocritical slaps on the wrist for scandalous fire.
News broadcasts during elevator journeys do keep track of your grander acts of mass destruction, and you'll inevitably determine the city's broad fate in the flows of the plot. But your status, reputation and choices are never seriously reflected in the chemistry of the spaces you phoned, the people you meet. And why would they care? After all, you're just spanking thug looking to own the universe, grinding your way up to that much-coveted boardroom view. To quote Gibson anti, "the street finds its own uses for things". I'm not sure The Ascent's streets have much use for the player.
