The Ascent

I've played quite a bit of this game now and I'm going to recommend it, but with some strong caveats that there's enough wrong with it you might not enjoy it. THE GOOD It captures the cyberpunk genre REALLY well. The world is fleshed out, the characters are strong, the gangs are well done, the language and slang could be right out of a William Gibson novel. I like most things about the combat and movement, though it might take you a bit to get over vertical and horizontal controls in a diagonal environment. The weapons feel distinct and give you a variety of ways to approach the game. There's a lot of armour variety but I'm not sure the differences are big enough to matter aside from just wearing the best anti bullet stuff. (vs electric, digital and fire) THE BAD First off, the thing that's going to pull you out of the depths of the immersion IS ALL THE RUNNING. There's a lot of travelling in this game, compounded by the fact that side quests continually aren't doable until main quests take you to the zone, or you take a unique path the devs didn't expect and so a quest doesn't let you continue it until you quit and reload. The game also crashes now and then, luckily you don't lose anything but you'll have to run back to where you were. The downside of combat is that it's common for mobs to spawn behind you, which is a neat dynamic for getting jumped. But if you run / dodge / kite to regroup to a safe place to attack and defend from, it's pretty common that the enemies just run away and reset. So despite the open world, combat is forced into these small areas where you're going to get shot at from every angle and disallowed from making strategic choices. This also means you can avoid combat by just continuing to run away as long as it's not a required battle. The navigation system not taking fast travel stations into account should be criminal and fast travel doesn't work between levels, so, more running. I can't tell if the game wants to be Diablo or a travel simulator. The balance feels off. Elements like getting augments punish you if you just equipment them rather than going to a doc, but the punishment is just an energy reset and it'll just regen, so it really doesn't matter. And considering all the running you do, this is for the best. There's a lot of boxes to be found for extra skill points and weapon upgrades, but the hacking system ends up holding you back, so you might spend some extra time running somewhere for a box then finding you need a higher hacking skill and you just wasted time. Speaking of hacking, it's not consequential and feels more like a cute add in to give you a different button to open things. Having to hack in combat is a pretty cool include though. VERDICT Overall I'm enjoying the atmosphere of this sci-fi cyberpunk game as well as the combat and story, but there's a lot of annoying blockers that could easily detract other people.