I think I like this game more than it deserves, and because I've loved cyberpunk nearly my whole life. From reading Gibson to watching Johnny Mnemonic a hundred times as a teen. My most-wanted book is an original copy of the original cybperunk anthology, Mirrorshades, and even if it's only kind of tangentially cyberpunk, The Matrix was the first movie that the power of internet piracy allowed me to see before it opened in theatres. I especially love dirty and grimy cyberpunk, like what The Ascent offers, and as such I enjoyed myself even though the game overally isn't really as good as I'd want it to be.

The second big thing about this game is that it's an action RPG centered around dualstick shooter controls, which is something I've wanted for over a decade. The only other similar (kind of) game that I can think of is How to Survive, which had an amusing if janky first game and a terrible sequel that no one should play (as well as a new spiritual successor that looks pretty good). And the shooting in The Ascent is pretty good, even if there's far too much of it.

There's really nothing at all wrong with the core ideas here, and in fact I appreciate them quite a bit, but there is just so much about the execution that felt bothersome nearly the whole way through. This game has your typical RPG structure where you run back and forth in a semi-open little world and perform various tasks and errands, and the writing is at least solid enough that it feels like I'm partaking in some cyberpunk subterfuge as I navigate the various floors and economical classes of this world's acrology, but one of the biggest problems in the game is how slowly your character moves! They're so slow! I suspect that this was out of necessity, as in the game engien can't load assets fast enough if you're allowed to run or for that matter pan and spin the camera, but at the same time, you can move faster by constantly rolling and at least the PS5 version can keep up with that. I never noticed any egregious pop-in when I rolled around the world, but doing that is also exhausting. I don't want to hammer a button to move around quickly and it was a huge relief when I finally found myself economically secure enough that I could start using the taxi service to fast travel around the game (as it allows you to call a taxi from and to any exterior location).

With the taxi and my endless amounts of credits solving the traversal issue, I bounced back and forth. Upon first launch, I immediately loved the game. Then I quickly got sick of the slow running and the large scale of the small world (meaning the world isn't huge, but there are comparatively long and empty travel paths between quest objectives). I liked building my cyberpunk woman with dreads and unreasonable facial implants that don't seem to actually do anything beyond looking cyberpunk. I liked messing around with the various imaginative guns, even though I ended up spending most of my time with the Recoil and the Overwhelmer simply for DPS reasons. I appreciated that there is transmog for the fashion victims, even though I didn't really end up using it and I thought the best armor I found looked pretty cool as it was. And your character is so zoomed out, with no camera options available, that I didn't even really find myself noticing their outfit or gun skin anyway. I was invested in the story and wanted to find out the answer to the mystery. Even though I hated the slow running and felt like a lot of things didn't come together, I didn't hate the game overall and wanted to see it through. And, as I type, I'm only about an hour into the DLC and I still want to see what it has to offer. I especially liked how one part of the DLC changes the camera angle to be very oldschool top-down, like I'm playing Dreamweb or something. Oh, yeah, the game does that and changes camera angles when it has something cool to show you, which I liked. Any time you approach an overlook location, the game knows that you'll want to see the cool stuff and shows you it.

However, the game was also very tiresome due to the aforementioned slowness and how can't you solve things like running between the elevators with a taxi ride (since the taxi just takes you to the middle of that are anyway and you still have to hoof it), and above all, the absolutely incessant spawning of enemies really took a lot of fun away, since this game doesn't do hostile and neutral zones. Just any time an enemy sees you, you'll get attacked, and aggroing a gang member means that 25 more of them will spawn immediately. And they're everywhere. I like the shooting and I think the cover system, where you can crouch down behind cover and press a button to aim over it, was pretty cool, but because enemies spawn from everywhere and the game absolutely adores spawning enemies behind you, it felt simply boring that I couldn't get anywhere without being accosted like 5000 times by 5000 dudes who I've already defeated 5000 times, and the absolutely non-stop surprise spawns from behind, coupled with various mortars and other attacks meant to force you out of cover, ultimately meant that the cover system ended up being useless. There's one piece of cover in this arena, and there's both attackers from behind and grenades being lobbed at me, and the mortar enemies launch a new grenade the same frame as the previous one explodes, so there was no time to ever sit behind cover and be safe. I get that this is the idea, but then why even bother with the cover system if I can basically never use it?

There's also the lore and story, which seems to have had a lot of work put into it with a rather expansive codex and many ideas seemingly inspired by both Gibson (like referring to the city as "the sprawl" and such) and Shadowrun (various aliens and possible hinting at supernatural things), but still doesn't feel like it quite comes together. This is a big spoiler, but I felt like it was kind of a whatever plot point so I'm going to spoil it and say that it just felt weird that the fallen "Ascent Group" megacorp had a backup routine where the AGI created another AGI and a whole other corporation in case the original corp fell, but then...why are there diehard corporate loyals for this new made-up corporation? Did the AGI just materialize them too? Also, why is there japanese everywhere? I know "because cyberpunk", but nothing aside from neon signs is japanese in this game. No japanese culture, no asian characters from what I remember (everyone's white or an alien), just neon signs in japanese because that's what you do in cyberpunk. I also felt like the story of you constantly being some form of lackey felt unsatisfying. At first, you're a corporate slave working under the "stackboss" (basically the local mayor) and then you "graduate" to being a corporate lackey instead of just a slave. At the very end, you're granted freedom, but that's not really the plot I wanted to play? I want to be a rebel or some kind of criminal that takes down the megacorps, not an assassin for hire for one, and I feel like that's not the story this game sells with its advertising and art direction. Like why are slaves even allowed cyberware, a "netdeck" for hacking and guns? Those should probably be highly outlawed for slaves in this world for it to make sense. It also has to be mentioned that it's just plain odd that the entire script was written and even had the voices recorded for it before they decided to add a gender choice to the character selector. At first, the dialogue is neutral and I even noticed one line where the text said something like "Good to see you, my boy", but the audio engineer had cut out the "my boy" from the voice lines. But they just stop doing that partway through the game, and by the end, my female character kept being referred to as a man by literally everyone. That'd be fine if this was intentional gender politics, but it's clearly not and they obviously just tossed in female characters close to the end of development without going through all of the dialogue to clean it up.

Oh, and maybe this should've gone in another paragraph, but the weapon system really stops making sense after the first 5 or so hours. In the beginning, you can experiment and mess around with various weapons, like I did, but once you and the enemies level up (note: they don't scale, the game thankfully uses classic "high level enemies in high level areas" logic) and it becomes necessary to start using components to add to your firepower, the choices become more narrow with each upgrade you pick until you are left with just a few choices viable for endgame. Basically, I can't use this new Mk1 gun I found because it's so inferior to my Mk10 I've spent the whole game upgrading. It doesn't help that you have to either run around aimlessly and hope to run into bounties, or go to a specific area (Scrapland), to farm components and that they forgot that maybe you should be allowed to purchase basic components since you need so many of those in order to experiment with guns. The fact that superior components, the ones you use to max out an already highly upgraded weapon, are rare and permanently limited (as in you can only upgrade a few guns per lap of NG+) is fine and makes sense, but basic components really should've been super common to allow for more experimentation. It would also have meant that we'd have something to spend leftover credits on, since I ended up finishing the game with like 500k I couldn't spend on anything.

I liked this game and I'll be buying the sequel, if we get one, since the end of this game promises one by having a sequel hook after the credits. I also just now read an article that claims that this game sold well and that the company sold for something like €30 million, which should mean that they have more than enough time and budget to make a bigger, badder and better sequel. Wikipedia claims that the original investment for this game was only about €100k and there's no way that's true, because even though this game is remarkable in that it's extremely pretty and was made surprisingly quickly considering the core team credits are only 12 people (with a bunch of outsourcing of various things raising the total number of people who worked on it), that amount of money only covers one year of salary for one person in Sweden, including taxes and fees. What I mean is that this team can do very impressive work and even though this game was uneven and had some major flaws, I do hope that the claims of influx of more money is true and that they have a chance to develop a sequel that delivers on the promise of this game. There is something here, and cyberpunk fanatics will probably find much to love, but this game also just ain't quite it. If you don't love cyberpunk as much as I do, you should probably deduct at least a star from my score.

I love the look of this game so much. This is the exact type of gritty disgusting vile cyberpunk that I love to gawk at while my face is bathed in an unholy red light. It has shades of all the popular cyberpunk fiction, but also Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! which is one of my favorite manga period. There’s echoes in here of a lot of the aesthetic trappings that really captivated me with Signalis, but just done in a more contemporary style with Bigger Money.

That’s kind of where my adoration for The Ascent begins and ends though. I don’t usually ding games for technical issues, because modern video games are so complex that it’s a miracle that any of them ever come out completely bereft of this sort of thing. That being said, this game, which is an ostensibly co-op shooter, has completely broken co-op. In the 6 or 7 hours I played with a friend we had the game crash one of our systems, freeze up completely about every 30 minutes, and make us unable to shoot our weapons in combat several times over. All in all it felt like I was spending more time rebooting the game than actually playing it. Apparently most of these issues are not present at all in the single player, but the entire appeal to me is the co-op element so this just stopped me dead in my tracks.

It would be one thing if the gameplay was absolutely stellar, maybe I’d suffer through these issues or just play by myself, but it’s a pretty bog standard action-rpg. There’s a mechanic for raising and lowering your weapon, which is neat in an isometric space, but in my time with the game I found very little reason to actually utilize that. There’s also surprisingly little interesting loot for a game of this type, the friend I was playing with and I just ended up on almost the exact same build because it didn’t ever seem worth branching out. Just nothing really fired any neurons for me, it’s the type of thing that’s frictionless enough I would probably just see it through to the end and forget about entirely if I had been allowed that luxury.