When The Ascent begins, you're a nobody. One of millions of galactic migrants who have come to the planet Veles looking for a better life, having been promised stable jobs, wealth, and success by the megacorporations who run it. But if there's one thing megacorporations are good at, it's lying. Veles is in fact a bleak dystopian hell-world, home to colossal, overcrowded habitats called arcologies. Imagine an entire city, and everyone who lives in it, squeezed into a single tower block and you'll have some idea of how bad life is here.
A megacorp called the Ascent Group paid for your ticket to Velen, but now you're in their debt—and the likelihood of you ever paying it off in a single lifetime is basically zero. This makes you an indent, which is a fancy way of saying you're a slave. When a dirty job needs doing, you're there to answer the call whether you want to do it or not. In fact, you start the game in the middle of one of these poorly paid gigs, sent into a garbage disposal facility to reboot a faulty AI. If the powerful stink doesn't kill you, the feral mutants will.
As is the rule in cyberpunk cities, the lower you are, the worse life is—and you are at the very bottom. But as The Ascent's title suggests, you don't stay here for long. This is a game about rising to the top, quite literally. As you make a name for yourself as a reliable mercenary, you'll ascend from the grimy, trash-filled depths to the gleaming pinnacle of the tower, where the rich and influential get to enjoy clean air and blue skies. It's a hell of a journey, and thanks to exceptional visual design and punchy combat, a hugely entertaining one.
The Ascent is an action RPG, with a heavy emphasis on action. You can play it alone or in co-op with three friends, and the shooting is magnificently brutal. You strafe and roll around the arcology blowing enemies away with oversized shotguns and exploding them with grenades. It's chunky, tactile, and exceedingly violent. Tiered loot spews satisfyingly out of fallen enemies, and your character is constantly levelling up. It's one of those games that is worryingly good at feeding your brain a constant stream of small, sharp dopamine hits.
Enemies come thick and fast, with some of the most aggressive AI I've seen in a game like this. This forces you to be constantly on the move, quickly assessing your surroundings. You can pin yourself behind cover, but it won't be long before the enemy pushes forward to try and flush you out. This is a quality shooter, albeit one with frequent difficulty spikes that have a nasty habit of creeping up on you when you least expect it. It's also relentless, subjecting you to an almost non-stop onslaught of action set-pieces and furious 🃏shootouts.
The arcology is impossibly dense and layered, and it's incredible to look at. Tonally it's a vibrant combination of cynical, anti-corporate cyberpunk, '80s sci-fi comics, and (naturally) lashings of Blade Runner, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell. Wearing this many influences on its studded leather sleeve, it should feel derivative, but it gets away with it somehow. However, the quality of the setting ꩵonly drives home how shallow the game ultimately is. Your interaction with this amazing pla🍸ce is limited almost entirely to shooting it to pieces.
A setting this good is crying out for a deeper, more quest-driven RPG, which I'm hoping we might get in a sequel. But accept The Ascent for what it is—an action-packed shooter with a light sprinkling of role-playing elements—and you'll get on with it just fine. It was formerly exclusive to PC and Xbox, but now PS4 and PS5 players can experience it, and they totally should. It's almost worth playing it for the arcology alone. This really is a remarkable setting, and dare I say, a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:better cyberpunk dystopia than Night City ever was.
