The Ascent

game feels like its meant to be played with friends and i have none of those, would be good to get proper ai followers that are permanent

Mostly an awesome experience. Mostly. I'd like to comment on it to guide the gamers and--hopefully--the devs. The Good: The scapes. Wow. Incredible background, lighting, lots of variety, feels very organic and immersive. I feel like I'm playing inside the old late '70s/early '80s Heavy Metal magazine. Sure, it's not original--it's Bladerunner (the original) and Shadowrun (ditto) blended into a top-down twin-stick diagonal map--but they nailed it. Incredible lighting, particle effects, music (feels very Perturbator, who in turn says he takes his cues from Vangelis--and no disrespect to the very talented artist Paweł Błaszczak who did the soundtrack for The Ascent). Similar but massively improved from Ruiner (which I bought for the soundtrack by visionary musician Susumu Hirasawa, and now so will you. At least watch the dude performing his song live and hope you age that gracefully). The Bad: I don't know how hard or expensive it is to make visuals this intense, but the voice acting does not match the quality. At times, it's embarrassingly bad. One guy pronounces the name of the character he's voicing for differently in the same sentence, several times. There are several instances of clipping (where the sound input is too strong and it sounds toasty). Devs: please fix the VAs. It's bad, and doesn't match the quality of the other sensory experiences from the game. Edit the AI for the non-combatants. As of how far I've played, there doesn't seem to be any penalty for terminating non-combatants, but I have a superstition about there being a special place in Hell for people who commit virtual atrocities. Killing innocents seems almost inevitable. You can pop off a shot to get non-combatants to start fleeing--but they don't always run _away_. Sometimes they just run around, or right into the crossfire. There's almost a minigame where you can try to send the innocents off with a warning shot (if you really try not to kill any innocents, it really adds to the challenge and makes the gun fights more exciting!), but this should be developed more. Make a greater penalty for killing non-combatants, but make non-combatants more eager to live--PLEASE! Also, I've frozen or crashed quite a few times on my brand-new, not-broke, game-designated machine. Something is inordinately demanding about this game, and it's not just the rather beautiful graphics. Can we clean this up somehow? Bounties: You'll get random special enemy encounters labelled as "bounties" throughout the game. Their strength varies, but their bounty does not. They're all worth 1000 creds, period. None of them drop special loot. I never had a problem with money in this game, but it's incredibly anticlimactic to kill a high-level bounty for the same amount of creds as a starting level bounty. And it's just creds, which you can get anywhere. DEVS: Can we make the higher-level bounties worth more, and can the bounties drop unique weapons? I mean, even if they just shoot a special color. Something. Bullet sponges and enemies healing up: A little later in the game, you'll go through several magazines trying to put a single enemy down, and there will be swarms of enemies. I don't find this to be an exciting challenge--just a tedious chore, like chewing on fat. Bullet sponges also make your attacks look and feel weak, which really takes away from the fun of the game. Even more maddeningly, if you fall back too far from where the enemies' spawn point is, they run back and heal up. You don't heal up, incidentally. So when you run into annoyingly spongy swarms and they push you back to far, all your work is for nothing, and now you just have to try again with low health. This is some controller-throwing-frustration-level stuff. The ???: You may or may not like this genre of top-down, twin-stick, diagonal map shooter. I actually typically hate it. But the gritty retro-futuristic dystopia and _very_ nicely-integrated synthwave soundtrack make it a real joy to play. The play is just a little remedial (follow the arrow, get into gun fights, follow the arrow some more), but the progression, leveling, and variety of cool retro-future armor, weapons, and skins, as well as new map areas, make up for a genre I would normally steer clear of. If you thought CyberPunk was going to be good but wasn't because it was just a horribly brain tumor simulator; if you thought Bladerunner was one of the best things that ever happened to cinema; if you read the old grungy Heavy Metal mags and wished you _play_ them--definitely give this a go. I haven't seen this kind of badass since 1986.

It mid at best, other have done it better, like Alien Swarm

Boring story, bland and forgettable world where everywhere feels like the same places you have already been too, combat is underwhelming, and the game crashes way too often. No wonder the devs left it for dead

На сьогоднішній день це найкращий нащадок Alien Shooter та ізометричних шутерів ще й присутній кооп

I wanted to give the game a chance because it looks pretty fun and interesting. However, it just feels boring and uninspired? I feel like I'm a regular human living in the 40k universe. Like it's so apocalyptic and dirty that it kinda turns me away. Not to mention the camera cannot be adjusted at all so I feel like I gotta sit 40 feet away from my monitor because I'm so zoomed in, and sometimes the camera auto zooms on specific things the game thinks you should look at and I have to move in a direction i literally cannot see because I cant move the camera myself. It as a whole feels clunky. However it was kinda interesting for the gameplay I did get out of it, but I cant see myself ever returning to the game because the clunky camera and aggressive cyberpunk apocalypse setting.

gameplay wise i like it, it reminds me a lot of satelite reign and i love that game, but graphics take a biiiiiig toll on the pc, at least mine, even on the lowest graphic settings which looks like a blob basicly. i would give the game a 7 outa 10, it's good, very good gameply wise but it's hard to enjoy for long if my pc heats up my entire room in 1 hour.