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.
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.