The Ascent

this game is fantastic. an ARPG, twin stick shooter, open world, cyberpunk adventure thats a dang good time. and amazing world setting and world building. idk, this games dope.

I absolutely enjoy this ARPG. The game play is fun, but might be repetitive for others. For a top down shooter I enjoy the gun play. My biggest complaint are the controls and the story is mediocre.

Gave it a shot in co-op but it felt really clunky and undercooked. The concept is great no doubt, but the execution isn't - and it honestly feels to me like it didn't get enough development time. I'm actually really disappointed about this one because I was very much looking forward to playing it, as it seemed to be a Diablo-like with a cyberpunk setting similar to Ghostrunner's, and I should have liked it in theory, but the combat didn't feel good at all, which for this type of game is my number one criterion.

I have mixed thoughts on this game overall, but can still recommend it due to how fun the combat loop was, even though it has some glaring issues in other departments. Combat: You have access to quite a large array of weaponry and powers, most of them feel fun to use, and can cause quite a bit of environmental destruction. Also, each weapon has a "universal" upgrade, meaning that even if you sell a specific copy of it, if you find another one on an enemy later on, it will retain the previous upgrade level, so you cannot lose upgrade resources. Selling unique weapons, on the other hand, is not something you can undo. My only real criticism in this department is that by the late game, a lot of weapons lose their usefulness, so your viable options shrink quite a bit. Besides the combat, the visuals do a lot of heavy lifting too. The cyberpunk environments are dense and colourful, so wandering around stays worthwhile even when the objective is just "go here, shoot that." The loop does not get much more complicated than that, but the guns feel good enough that I didn't mind. Story: Not the focus of the game. For the most part, you run jobs for mob bosses and megacorps who keep you on a need-to-know basis, which is a convenient excuse for the game to skimp out on having to flesh out the details. There IS technically a more or less coherent story here, but it is mostly set dressing to justify the combat. The Cyber Heist DLC leans all the way into this: you take a job, things go wrong, you shoot your way out, and you never actually learn what the job was really about. Whether that bothers you is a taste thing - I was not too fond of the way that story resolved, but the final fight was good enough that it balanced out. The mission briefings are written in-character, and the voice is basically a mercenary who doesn't care who gets hurt as long as the money clears. The gameplay backs that up - enemies aggro constantly in crowded civilian areas, so you'll rack up a serious bystander body count by the end whether you mean to or not. The only way to keep your hands clean is to ignore enemies entirely and keep walking, which is easier said than done when 10 guys are shooting at you. Traversal: my biggest gripe with the game. You can taxi between discovered areas, but only within the same tier of the Arcology. Changing tiers means fast travelling to an elevator (loading screen), walking to it (30 seconds), riding it (another loading screen), then fast travelling to where you actually wanted to go (third loading screen). You do this constantly between missions and the dead time piles up. Letting the taxi cross tiers, even at a higher cost, would have killed most of the tedium. There's also no sprint. On the long walks between taxi points and objectives you either stroll or roll - rolling is faster but looks ridiculous, especially through a crowd. Difficulty: I played on Normal and the balance was mostly fair, though a few optional encounters spiked well above the main missions around them. DLC stuff: Cyber Heist is short but worth it if you liked the base game; if you didn't, it's mostly more of the same. Its melee weapons wildly outclass every gun in the main game. You more or less need them in the DLC, but bring them back to the main story areas, and they one-shot almost anything. 100% completion: Took me around 18 hours to 100%, which felt about right - enough to see and try everything without it starting to drag. There are also no missable achievements. The two co-op ones can be done solo with couch co-op if you have two controllers, though keyboard-and-mouse plus a controller won't work, it registers both as the same player. Game is worth it on sale, in my opinion.

【NOT RECOMMENDED 不推荐6/10 】 非常尴尬的一款游戏，美术硬派，设计却乏善可陈，而且有大量干扰游玩流畅度的设计点，让人很快就疲惫了 太可惜了

an update coming.. YEAH!

Kann es nicht mit Maus und Tastatur spielen. Ich kann mich zwar bewegen aber Maus-aim funktioniert bei mir nicht. Keine Lösung gefunden und da dies das einzige spiel ist das solche ein Problem aufweist, sorry Devs.. mies.

Frequent crashes.