It’s a grindy, looty, shooty kind of game where hordes of enemies are conveniently dropped into areas for pitched battles with plenty of cover and opportunities to blow things up, and the steady flow of new loot will almost make up for the fact that the experience and skills system is too shallow for an RPG. Not of the same quality as Housemarque’s Alienation or Dead Nation, but still decent. So what do you get from The Ascent, if the narrative is as shallow as a toddler’s swimming pool that worried parents have drained, so that there’s no risk of little Johnny slipping and breaking a bone? You get a decent twin-stick shooter. In fact, when we’re talking about particularly potent narrative genres, like cyberpunk, a narrative that can’t grapple with its core themes is a particularly significant problem. If you’re going to make a cyberpunk work, though, the audience is going to expect cyberpunk, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask. That’s all those books are in the first place, so the video game adaptations do them justice. Or turn Tom Clancy’s books into nationalistic shooters that excuse western militarism. It’s fine to make a dumb action game based on pulp fantasy fiction. We’re still waiting for the thought that went into great works of the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson to truly be done justice in video games, and The Ascent is another misfire. It would be like reading Dracula and deciding that vampires are just monsters that suck people’s blood, or reading Ayn Rand and thinking that Bioshock was an adequate critique of the nuances of objectivism and… yeah, okay, the video game industry doesn’t do this stuff well as a rule of thumb, but it’s still particularly disappointing here, because it’s cyberpunk. “ascends”), and then there’s the question of what all of this says about humanity and our socio-economic and political systems? The problem is that across its 20-hour campaign, The Ascent never figures out how to go beyond those basics, or even grapple with them properly. Corporations are bad, bodies can be modified, resistance and revolution rises from the roots (i.e. So, what do you do? Pick up guns and shoot things. Unfortunately, your corporation goes bust and suddenly your tenure, life, and everything else comes under very real threat.
You’re an indent – short for indentured servant – and that means you’re basically a slave working for the corporation that tricked you to move to a hellscape city. Is there a plot buried somewhere within the game? Sure. Instead, it’s quite content being a generic (though well-made) dual-stick shooter with light-touch RPG elements. The Ascent does nothing with its strong premise. Unfortunately, any faith placed in the game is misplaced. That game struggled to ever look like anything but “corporations make cyberpunk with a giggle at how silly the genre is to them.” The Ascent seemed genuine, and that was exciting.
Everything about The Ascent promised cyberpunk fans that they would be able to forget about Cyberpunk 2077. It’s the only way to describe it), it all looks the part. From wading through the gank of refuse waste and… much less wholesome byproducts from humanity’s essentially wasteful existence, right through to marching over the rusted metal streets that comprise the cities, and hanging out in pubs that look and sound like neon (yes, sound like neon. That gets it off to a most excellent start. The Ascent looks gorgeous in the kind of grim and nihilistic way that the best in the cyberpunk genre can look gorgeous.
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