Review: The Ascent Is a Gorgeous Cyberpunk Vision, but Its Combat Is a Grind

The game will easily hook you with its well-crafted, hyper-focused narrative and immersive worldbuilding.

The Ascent
Photo: Curve Digital

In the cyberpunk future of developer Neon Giant’s The Ascent, humans live alongside aliens within a massive corporation-owned and profit-seeking arcology. Your nameless protagonist is among many humans who have traveled to the planet Veles, paying off the cost of the expensive flight as an indent (short for indentured servant) for the Ascent Group. Once there, indents are kept in place by low wages, oppressive conditions, and the overall culture, from sexbot brothels for those in the Warrens to prisons and casinos for those a level up on Highstreet, who are still unable to see the sky reserved for those at the Pinnacle. As such, it’s more than apropos that The Ascent has no problem hooking us to its campaign, specifically through its well-crafted, hyper-focused narrative and immersive worldbuilding.

The Ascent is an inherently political game, but the only thing it explicitly takes a position on is being anti-anarchy. By the end of the first mission, the Ascent Group abruptly goes bankrupt and chaos ensues, and rather than try to fight for freedom, or anything else for that matter, your character dutifully takes jobs from middle managers as they try to keep gangs and rival corporations from seizing property. The way the game sees it, the old ways—law, order, routine—long ago lulled you into a false sense of comfort. For your character, working out that contract feels like the most stable option, given that the alternative is just mindless killing for temporary gains, even as everything else falls apart around you within the arcology.

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In the end, your bosses may change, but never the circumstances of your indentured servitude, and you will find that there’s little room to criticize the system that’s enslaved you when strangers keep running at you with katanas and shotguns as you cross between districts. This scenario is a chillingly effective way to demonstrate how people become devoted to law and order, and while The Ascent never outright says what you should believe, its worldbuilding is so rich that you fully understand why your character might want to help the mysterious yGroup corporation reinstate law and order and gain full control over the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and the other arcology systems left behind by the Ascent Group.

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Would that the game’s combat were as rich. While it may be intentionally monotonous in ways that emphasize that shooting people is a job to your character, that also means that it’s never a joy. The vast majority of fights—especially those rare scenarios in which you must defend an on-site location—play out like old-school Gauntlet, with hordes of enemies mindlessly rushing at you while you do little more than mow them down with pistols, shotguns, rifles, and rockets. That’s fun for the first few hours, and intermittently interesting each time a new enemy type appears, be it a giant mech or a sneaky hacker who uses digital trickery to make other allies invincible. But at heart, you’re doing nothing more than occasionally ducking behind cover and shooting. Your cybernetic augments—robotic tentacles, explosive spider drones, and stasis-inducing dragons—makes combat flashier but not less of a grind.

Otherwise, the rest of The Ascent captivates with its masterful worldbuilding. Every environment tells a different story. A trip to the warehouses and docks of the Cosmodrome paints a bleak picture of how people are shipped in much the same way as materials. Visiting the expensive, vacuum-cooled, blue-lit server columns of the dNexus, which maintains the arcology’s AGI, makes the ruling corporation’s poor upkeep of other areas all the more appalling. You can see how residential areas were designed to pit the poor against one another, with those in the haphazard apartments of Blossom Hills still counting their blessings for being better off than the squatters in the partially submerged nearby Black Lake Towers, as opposed to demanding a taste of the luxury found a tier up in the Gemini Towers.

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The Ascent’s savviest move is making the arcology its main character. Trains run on their own schedules, NPCs carry on conversations whether you stop to listen to them or not, and there’s no exposition for concepts like “Escher loops” and “the First Law.” You’re not a hero, only a replaceable employee. The commune of off-the-grid coders aren’t relying on you, and there’s nothing you can do to help a traumatized recent arrival who woke to find that his family of 70 years was merely a cryosleep-induced dream. And so you look, listen, and empathize with the concerns of this vibrant, lived-in arcology. It’s a terrible place to live, and a terrifyingly believable premonition of where we might end up, but a wonderful one to get lost in.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by Renaissance.

Score: 
 Developer: Neon Giant  Publisher: Curve Digital  Platform: Xbox Series S/X  Release Date: July 29, 2021  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Sexual Themes, Simulated Gambling, Strong Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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