In practice it takes a little while to get used to, moreso because none of the options allow you to shoot enemies that are upstairs or downstairs from your position. Sometimes bystanders will run away when the shooting starts, sometimes they’ll continue to stand and chat even as the world explodes around them.Īn interesting shooting system allows you to hold the left trigger to aim high or crouch to aim low, or simply shoot to aim centre-mass. Sometimes enemies will attack you on sight, other times they’ll wait until you start shooting. I wouldn’t mind so much if the action was always top-notch, but unfortunately this can feel inconsistent, too. That said, so much of your time in the overworld is spent walking around from place to place – even after the fast travel system is unlocked – that those dazzling skyboxes become less impressive in a fairly short time. It can’t be all dazzle, all the time, but the contrast is stark. Conversely, the missions often take place in tighter, more confined environments. Some of the backdrops on display in the former are enough to make you stop and stare at the sheer amount of detail. You spend almost as much time running around the staggeringly good-looking overworld as you do in the considerably less-impressive tunnels of the underworld. The story doesn’t do anything new with the setting, but does a fairly good job of presenting you with antagonists to hate and destroy. Maybe the fact that literally anyone could become a badass super-soldier is the message – especially as you’re repeatedly forced to turn on the string-pullers who are facilitating these upgrades. You could be anyone, and still get the same cyber upgrades and gear to make you more combat-ready.īut then, maybe I missed the point first time round. One of my gripes with this set up is that there is nothing special about your character. In Neon Giant’s hellscape, Ascent is a private military group-cum-corporate behemoth that uses throwaway mercenaries to do its dirty work. You play as an Indent (“indentured servant”), assigned to work for the Ascent Group. Story and content-wise, we’re getting the same game on PS5 as we did on PC and Xbox. At least now, the option exists to control that element. It’s not hard to make a player character look like a badass in a cyberpunk setting, but the main character in The Ascent looked like they’d swallowed a high-powered magnet and been dragged through a scrapyard. One of my biggest complaints about The Ascent was the armour design. This sounds superficial but is actually a much sought-after addition. You can visit a store in the hubs and apply skins to your armour based on other items you’ve found. It already looked pretty damn good, and the power of the PS5 wasn’t likely to improve on the PC version anyway. Re-entering the dystopian world of Veles, I wasn’t met with any noticeable graphical updates or changes. Some of the difficulty feels more balanced, but that could be the benefit of experience. There have been some patches and tweaks to the previous release and these have been carried over. Now, almost a year after the original release, The Ascent has come to PS5 – but how much has changed, and how much have the changes improved things? And I’ll be honest, some of the backdrops are absolutely stunning. I played it on PC, and so was privy to a pretty smooth experience performance-wise. It also suffered from some fairly intense difficulty spikes that made for an uneven experience. For a start, it requires a lot of walking around between missions, and your character isn’t exactly superfast. While it looks amazing in places and the shooting has its high points – particularly during multiplayer sessions – some design choices let it down. Unfortunately, when I finally came to review it I wasn’t overly impressed by some of the elements. The grimdark cyberpunk aesthetic and the promise of Diablo-esque slaying and looting had my attention from the start. I’ll admit to being pretty hyped for The Ascent when it launched on Xbox and PC in the Summer of 2021.
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