But, though the aesthetic is now a little played out, it’s rare to see it executed as well as in The Ascent.
The game is set on the dystopian planet Veles within a vast arcology controlled by battling megacorporations. You are an “indent”, having agreed to the loss of your freedom in exchange for leaving Earth. Your job is to do whatever your boss tells you, and thankfully this is generally mowing down waves of enemies with high-powered weaponry rather than fetching him coffee or doing his laundry.
After a humbling opening mission crawling through the ‘deepStink’ maintenance level, you’re brought up into the city and it’s a jaw-drop moment. This is a stupendously good looking game, with the granular future-shock detail reminding me of comic-book art by Mobius or Geoff Darrow. I spent 15 hours blasting through this and each and every environment had me drooling.
Every surface bears the pock-marks and wear of a million feet tramping over it. Trash and debris fill the seedier streets with abandoned hardware and bullet holes hinting at an unwavering baseline of anarchy. The history of the city is told through its faded glories: the shuttered zoo flanked by graffiti-tagged elephant statues; monuments to long-forgotten dignitaries; and makeshift businesses repurposing old buildings like a hermit crab moving into a new shell.
All that’s contrasted against sojourns into sterile labs (significantly less sterile once I’m done with them), polished chrome corporate headquarters, and vacuum-sealed AI incubators. My ‘take screenshot’ button got a hell of a workout.
The Ascent is no slouch when it comes to shooting either. At first, your options are limited, but the game soon doles out enough fun abilities and weapons to keep things interesting. I particularly enjoyed the ability to spawn a group of explosive spider bots to swarm enemies, to create a bubble of slowed time around you and, best of all, a deeply satisfying ‘hydraulic punch’ that simultaneously disintegrates baddies and blasts their skeleton out of them.
By the later levels, the action is cranked up to an absurd degree. During the final mission, I’d upgraded my rocket launcher to have rapid reloads and ridiculous damage, meaning I was effectively a walking explosion that spawned killer robots. The game became a psychedelic tangle of particle effects, flying rubble, and floating numbers that was too chaotic to make sense of, but hey, I walked out of there in one piece so must have been doing something right.
I also got a chance to play through some of the game in three-player local co-op, which predictably made things even more fun. Even from an isometric viewpoint it felt surprisingly cinematic to be back-to-back with two buddies, machine-guns blazing as we held our ground against a horde of rampaging mutants. Then again, if things rapidly spiralled into chaos in solo, a full complement of players with end-game equipment may have melted my graphics card.
The above loveliness means the shortcomings hurt that much more. At the top is that the story and writing fail to live up to the promise of the environment. Dialogue is stuffed with future jargon and acronyms that make it difficult to figure out what characters are talking about, even when armed with the in-game glossary. Beyond that your perpetually mute avatar has no personality, history or desires - there’s nothing there to latch on to.
At the bedrock of cyberpunk is class warfare, with its dystopias warning us of the endpoint of corporate tyranny and the commodification of individuals. The Ascent gets halfway there purely through its environmental storytelling, but the plot fumbles the ball by putting you in a conflict between two organisations you neither know nor care about and appears to have no interest in expressing an opinion about its world and its parallels to our own.
Fortunately, bad writing is fixable.
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