The Ascent

This game is odd. It has a plot that is overwhelmingly "meh", characters that could essentially not exist (I cannot remember the name of anyone for the life of me), and areas that blend together [i] so well [/i] that they aren't visually distinct enough to memorize. And yet it's of the more memorable experiences I've had playing a game of its type. This game has a beautiful environment to explore with fun combat and an extremely rich depth of hand-crafted visual worldbuilding. I mean my god this game is stunning. It's everything I'm looking for in a dystopic cyberpunk environment. That said... It's also a horribly unoptimized mess. I'm on a PC with an RTX 5080, a 9850X3D, and 64GB RAM running the game off of a 990 PRO and still I've had multiple fatal crashes that just end the game out of nowhere. Immediately. The shader cache never quite finishes compiling which causes the game to stutter and lag, and sometimes essential elements of the world just disappear—trying to complete the side mission "That Guy", e.g., where you have to travel to The Edge to kill [i] that guy [/i], had me incredibly confused because literally none of the enemies in the area spawned. I didn't realize that could even happen. The only way to fix it was to restart the game. The map is also borderline useless. It's a cool concept that, perhaps unsurprisingly, is visually coherent with the overall aesthetics of the game, but outside of item/quest/shop markers there's virtually no useful information to glean from it (and even the stuff it does have isn't particularly elucidating). You can't set waypoints, so anything that isn't a quest is something you kinda just have to amble towards and hope you get there. Most areas are incredibly large without any further sub-areas so even if you memorize the larger map it's going to be a lot of checking where you are in relation to where you want to go. The whole thing is just a bit too freeform to be useful, which is odd considering how essential it is for any game. The fast travel system is [i] fine [/i], but for some reason taxis don't drop you off near other travel options. To get to higher or lower levels of the world you need to use elevators... Which taxis can't traverse, meaning you'll need to get as close as you can to the elevators in order to ascend or descend. That's all fine and good, except... It'll drop you off a not-insignificant distance from them, meaning there's still a trek involved in getting where you need to go. The metro system is an awesome idea that largely suffers from the same issues; taxis will not drop you anywhere near the stations, so in order to use them you either have to walk to the nearest one (at which point you might as well take a taxi) or hope that your travels remain largely within the vicinity of any given stop. Taxis can't be called from inside a building, which makes sense diegetically I suppose, but this is a video game. There doesn't have to be rules. It wouldn't break my immersion if I were able to call a taxi from inside. Unfortunately it all adds up to what's not so much a "fast travel" system rather than a "mostly quicker than walking" system. As others have said, the gameplay loop can get pretty boring. It's fine when actually doing main missions, but traveling to said missions is going to be a lot of "do mob control -> hope you don't die -> collect the loot -> travel until you run into another mob -> see step 1". Good for leveling up, not so good for keeping gameplay momentum high. Loot drops will mostly give you stuff you already have, which is good for earning money—economy in this game is largely a non-issue—but becomes less and less exciting the longer it goes on. Ultimately not a knock on the game but if that kind of action isn't your scene you may not enjoy non-essential parts of the game. Boss fights are largely forgettable as well. They're either too random to feel consequential or they're so inundated with moblings that it draws your focus off of them... Or, in a lot of cases, the boss fight [i] is [/i] a mob, in which case it's virtually indistinguishable from normal gameplay. I would have loved to see some Big Baddies get built up in a way that makes you look forward to dying to them a hundred times, but instead it's mostly a case of "Oh, ok. I guess I'm in a boss fight now." Despite (or perhaps in spite of) all of this... I can't recommend this game enough. It's so much fun to play. The developers have crafted a world so full of love and care and attention to detail that all I want to do is explore all of it. The weaponry, the gadgets, the augs, the styling options, the focus on form [i] and [/i] function... I'm thirsty as hell and it's a tall glass of water calling my name. It's hugely inspiring to wander around, and every area has me going "Ooh, I wonder what's over there!" It's an experience that makes me want to craft my own world and continue building upon the phenomenal concepts the devs of this game have introduced. If you can get past its shortcomings, this game offers an immense amount of fun that is rarely replicated and tremendously engaging. While highly imperfect, it's a valiant effort towards a pretty massive undertaking from a small, young, upstart studio. While my review is highly critical, it's because I know what this game [i] could be [/i] given what it currently is. It comes from a place of love—a type of love that I hope to find in every game I play. The Ascent is not for everyone, but it's certainly for me.