
The Ascent is at its best when there's loads going on, which makes its seemingly random enemy density and placement an even more curious design choice. Chances are at least one of these will want to be a healing option, since otherwise your only source of health regeneration is getting lucky with drops from enemies (hanging your survival hopes on RNG is never a good strategy) or hoping there's a vending machine nearby.
#The ascent review game plus#
There's a pretty broad selection of augs on offer as the game goes on, ranging from simple explosives to summoned drones, bots, and mechs, plus you can freely switch these out as you luck into new ones that better suit your build.

There are no classes and only ranged weapons, so most of the build diversity comes from the augments you load up on, and how you invest Skill Points in key stats, which offer their own inherent benefits (improved crit rates, faster reloads, better agility, etc.) as well as powering up certain kinds of augs. It's a chaotic twin-stick shooter at its core, with light RPG elements and some decent character progression options to add more depth. It's a real shame The Ascent is so plagued with technical issues, because when it works, it's really enjoyable. You'll want to be wary of this if you plan on playing with others, as skipping any major story mission will lock you out of the related achievement until/unless you play through the campaign again. You see, The Ascent only offers a single auto-save slot, and joining another player's co-op session overwrites your progress (everything bar your character and inventory, basically) with that of the host. My workaround for the major roadblocks was the same each time: exploit the game's awful co-op checkpointing to pick up an early story mission checkpoint from a second save file, then rush through the main missions again (and again.) with my massively OP character. While some of these were quite amusing (one time, a boss decided not to spawn, but after getting myself killed to reset the checkpoint, it saw fit to spawn four of the boss at once, and I got unceremoniously destroyed), the majority of The Ascent's issues are just infuriating. We encountered no fewer than four game-breaking bugs - most involving key story objectives or characters not functioning or spawning - on top of a list of less severe glitches and other issues, as well as several hard crashes. It's a bummer to have to start a review on a negative note, but The Ascent's issues proved just too numerous and serious to overlook. It could certainly stand to be a little less punk if it meant the game actually, y'know, let you play it properly without having to tiptoe around potentially game-breaking issues - as punk as it is, it's also really quite busted. It doesn't mind that you see its awful texture and detail pop-in during the transit sequences designed to disguise pretty lengthy loading times.

#The ascent review game upgrade#
Sometimes it just decides it has had enough and kicks you back to the Xbox dashboard, even fobbing you off with some excuse about needing to upgrade your graphics card (yes, on console).

Enemy placement? The Ascent just does whatever it likes, cramming armies of adversaries into areas which were completely empty on your last visit or vice versa. The Ascent Curve Games Xbox Game Pass Review Game review Action-RPG Luke Albigés The Ascent really puts the 'punk' in 'cyberpunk.' So strong is the non-conformity here that The Ascent doesn't care if its menu options just stop working, or if mission-critical items and objectives can't be interacted with.
