The Ascent

After playing the game a fair bit, I do not recommend it. It looks great, sounds great, but delivers a fairly shallow and very repetitive experience, made worse with backtracking, and riddled with frequent freezes and crashes in multiplayer. The Pros: + The game absolutely nails the cyberpunk aesthetic, with tons of neat details in every environment. + Character visuals and stat distribution can be altered at hubs at any time. + The music tracks for combat encounters are simple, but good. + Competent voice acting for all missions-related NPCs, with a decent dose of humor. The Cons: - [b] The game is unstable, especially in co-op. [/b] Playing 4-man online coop, we could not complete a single mission without at least a couple freezes and crashes along the way - and individual missions are not long. It is bad enough that I would not recommend this game even if this was its only shortcoming. - Almost all weapons play the same, with the differences boiling down to clip sizes, base reload speed and damage type (of which there are 4, but 2 of those are so rare/limited they might as well not exist) - possibly revving times for minigun-like weapons. A few weapons get perks like ricocheting bullets, extra fire damage or homing projectiles, but that is all. - The game is trying to have a cover system, but a commonly used method for spawning in additional enemies is to simply have them step out of a portal (even street thugs and feral mutants!), often behind or next to the player, invalidating any cover they had. So you just run and gun most of the time. - There is just ONE melee weapon option in the base game. In a world of augmented humans and aliens carrying huge hammers, electric stun batons, combat shields and katanas, you get a metal baseball bat. - There are no meaningful character builds. The main differences between two characters boil down to which combat augments they equip, the rest is just flat stats boosting critical hit rate, reload speed, max health etc. In terms of gameplay experience, everyone is the same. - Navigating the game world can be headache. The world has multiple levels and sub-areas, connected by elevators, bridges and stairs, which the stylized world map does not communicate well. There is also frequent backtracking, with combat encounters resetting between visits.

The Ascent is a top down action adventure where you explore a connected world to carry out missions. The gameplay is shooting anything that walks, pick/buy equipment, level up to improve your stats, equip up to 2 unique skills called augments, equip unique grenades (called tactical gear) and find all chests for rewards, including cyberdeck upgrades to become better at hacking (being able to open higher level doors and chests). The story (and side quests) will send you to new areas gradually, you will be able to use trains and taxis to fast travel freely after a while. The one thing obvious should be how gorgeous the game looks. The screenshots on the game’s steam page fully represent what you can expect, with my PC at least. I always get distracted by the beauty of the environments. Not only that, the game has tons of locations with different assets and so many details. The game is also almost fully voice acted aside from random NPC walking on the street. A lot of effort went into creating this world with an extensive codex that details the different species, factions, locations, terms used, all quest givers and even equipment brands! The gameplay is fun, at first it felt typical as in been there and done that, but it grew on me thanks to the variety of weapons and skills. And I loved exploring the world to clean the map of all the chest icons. The game does have some issues though. For starters, while it’s nice that a co-op partner can join and leave at any time, my partner did have some issues with the game freezing and having to reload the game again. I didn’t experience this as much but it’s probably because I was the host the entire time. There were some performance issues, mainly inside trains when going from one place to the next. The map can be very confusing with depth perception, thinking you’re next to a chest but it turns out it’s one floor higher/lower and not knowing how to get there. The game’s balance is off in terms of having too much money and not being able to do anything with it. I’m guessing it’s balanced for the players who don’t explore and only go from one mission to the next. Being able to buy upgrade components or having an additional way of making yourself stronger could have added incentive for the players who went out of their way to explore. The Ascent can only be described as ambitious. It punches way above its weight and it did a good job of setting the stage for creating this believable world that can be further expanded upon. The price of around €30 is A LOT but I understand why it costs so much after playing it. There should be plenty of opportunities to get it cheaper, make use of them for the game is worth experiencing if you like exploring a detailed world with mechanics/progression systems that aren’t complex. I enjoyed my time, it’s a good co-op experience aside from some technical issues. It took me around 32 hours to complete the game and get all the achievements. You will need the DLC to get 100%. Most achievements will come naturally through exploration. There are unmissable ones, do something specific, co-op exclusive actions and 2 that are a bit grindy.

I bought this game cheap of off Loaded to play with a friend of mine as we are both Cyberpunk fans. All I can say is I am extremely disappointed, after 4 years of this game being out, there are game breaking bugs and the multiplayer just refuses to work. I am not the only one with these issues as the Reddit is riddles with posts from people with similar issues, it is such a shame because it controls really well and was genuinely fun until my main mission bugged and I couldn't play any further in single player. Don't waste your money, especially on here.

pretty fun game ruined by random game freeze . gameplay like diablo but with guns , world is in cyberpunk setting with sexy soundtrack. loved all of it but finishing dlc was a nightmare because of random freezes becoming more common but in general pretty good game

This game looks incredible, but I just couldn’t enjoy playing it. The cyberpunk world is stunning and the controls themselves feel smooth and responsive. But once the shooting starts, things fall apart. Combat is immediately overwhelming and frustrating, especially solo, with encounters that feel more chaotic than strategic. Instead of being engaging, it quickly turns into a slog. There’s clearly a lot of effort in the presentation, but for me, the gameplay just didn’t back it up.

This game is great! Until you realize that co-op is going to hard crash your whole group ever 15 minutes or so making any long term play impossible. If you only care about a single player experience it could be good. But I think pitching a game that constantly crashes in co-op as a co-op game without fixing the issue over the course of a year is disingenuous at best.

I really wanted this game to be good... I mean the concept and the graphics and levels are really great. The game... Big semi self-explored area. Run here fight the same enemies over and over again run back. Run here fight a guy with a rocket. Run back. I really liked the idea I really liked the story but the gameplay, for me, was boring 3/5

The game is good, but I can't recomend it. Last time I played it it was really hard to make it run properly, way too buggy and it has been abandoned.

食之无味，弃之可惜。 精致的赛博朋克风格画面，机设很棒！但是缺乏地标性建筑和简洁清晰的地图。 音乐乏善可陈，没什么记忆点。 玩法就是俯视角射击，带有明显RPG成长要素，但是武器，配备平衡一塌糊涂。真正有用的东西就那么几样。 剧情有可圈可点之处，但节奏和逻辑安排得并不好，漏洞百出，结尾更是让人大跌眼镜。 尤其是每个任务之间频繁的跑图（2到5分钟毫无意义的跑图），纯纯水时间。 218的价格还要自己再补全DLC，毫无性价比可言，建议别买。