Jeff Bezos recently declared his intention to move all industry onto corporate-owned off-world colonies. Neon Giant’s The Ascent is pretty much a treaty on what a terrible idea that is.
A stunning isometric cyberpunk action RPG, The Ascent was created by a team of just 19 people and was clearly a labour of love for all involved.
The resume of the developers at Neon Giant is impressive, with previous credits including Doom, Far Cry 3, and Gears of War, and It shows too. The Ascent is easily one of the best looking games available on modern hardware. Team Neon has created a rich and incredibly detailed world both in looks and lore.
Since I’m a sucker for anything cyberpunk, I was instantly taken by the level of detail and world-building on display in every inch of the environment. The dirty streets are piled high with refuse while neon signs flicker and rain cascades down. Street gangs wait in alleyways to ambush anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path, while feral beasts roam the undercity amongst the pistons and pumps that keep the sordid metropolis ticking over.
The lore Neon Giant has created takes queues from genre greats like Dick, Gibson and Wagner. It’s obvious that great pains were taken to make sure every last facet of the world was mapped out. I’m sure there’s a game bible somewhere thick enough to break your toe on that will tell you what’s happening in every part of the universe they’ve created.
As a result, the world and its characters feel alive. No one in the cast feels one-dimensional, although the dialogue is peppered with the usual technobabble you find in most science fiction, the dialogue is sharp and delivered with aplomb by a top-notch cast.
At its core, though the ascent is essentially an isometric dungeon-crawling RPG with the goblins and loot replaced with cyborgs and spare parts.
It’s clear that Diablo was an obvious inspiration for a lot of the combat and gameplay, but rather than hacking through caves full of and breaking open chests full of gold, you’re breaking into offices and gunning down waves of corporate lackeys and then emptying the safe of its credits and trade secrets.
The Ascent is a thinking man’s twin-stick shooter, but it’s still more Smash TV than Fallout. Though the RPG elements affect how your guns work and how much health you might have, all of that is kept firmly under the hood as the action itself is slick, fast, and responsive.
You can easily lob a grenade to take out a few thugs, then dive behind cover and return fire to pick off a couple of stragglers before finally hopping over what’s left of the concrete block you were hiding behind to punch the final thug square in the jaw. When it all comes together, it’s exhilarating.
The controls are simple too. Want to hack something or open a create? Push a button, and it pops open. Want to loot a corpse? Just walk over it.
You can also play through the entire game in co-op with up to four players either online or on the sofa. It works a treat and the online runs smooth as silk and it’s easy to drop into another game to help gun down some enemies together, or simply pick up a pad and help out at home.
Its clear co-op is the intended way to play the game, as it does a brilliant job of sanding down a lot of the game’s rougher edges.
For a start, it balances out the game’s difficulty. Although The Ascent isn’t impossible by any means, in single-player at least, you’ll often have to replay sections as a couple of stray bullets can often mean your death unless you’ve managed to master the cover system and keep on top of equipping the best gear and upgrades.
As a result, you can’t just play through the main story without needing to grind, thankfully though, there are plenty of interesting little asides and side missions available that reward you with ample amounts of additional XP and gear.
Thankfully, the levelling systems feel deep, and there is plenty of different gear, guns and powers to experiment with, allowing you to tailor your character to a playstyle that suits you.
Though the combat is fun, it can also be repetitive. The game’s latter stages mostly involve missions securing corporate assets while taking on tough combinations of enemies. It also pulls the move of reusing early game bosses as late-game fodder.
The story also fails to reach its full potential through the game’s lengthy 20-hour run time.
The opening is excellent with the player arriving on the planet Vales to work as an Ident for the Ascent Group. Initially, life isn’t too bad as you go around cracking skulls for your corporate masters. But when the heads of the company go AWOL, the whole planet is plunged into chaos as rival corporations and gangs vie to pick the bones of The Ascent Group and fill the power vacuum left by the sudden disappearance of the planets ruling class.
Though The Ascent does a brilliant job of recreating what life on a corporate planet in the middle of a coup would be like, it begins to feel repetitive, as your character, despite climbing the corporate ladder, never seems to be anything more than a gun for hire protecting corporate assets in a world that you have little impact on. But maybe that’s the point. Ultimately we are all just cogs in a corporate machine that we can neither dismantle nor change.
One other minor niggle, for me at least, is that it takes itself a little too seriously at times. For a game that takes clear inspiration from 2000AD, a few more jokes, even some dark ones, would have done wonders for its tone and make it feel less of a slog at times.
Ultimately though, these complaints feel like niggles, because, at its best, The Ascent soars. When the combat comes together, you can’t help but feel like a bad-ass, and being back to back with a co-op partner wiping out waves of enemies never gets old.
It’s also hard to not stomp around the neon-soaked streets and not feel like Deckard hunting a replicant or Kusanagi on the trail of a terrorist. It’s intoxicating stuff and a world I hope we get to return to soon.
If you’re a fan of the genre, The Ascent was probably already on your radar. If you’re looking for a decent dungeon crawler to tide you over till Diablo 4 rolls around, you should give it a spin. If you have Gamepass, you have no excuse.
Put simply, games as special as The Ascent don’t turn up all that often, and it is a game everyone needs to play if only to show them the inevitable work life for their great-great-grandchildren.
