While Sable took up most of my time on the Xbox Series S was voted one of the best indie titles of 2021, there’s one indie title that I felt deserved an equal amount of attention and it is one game that managed to do justice to the cyberpunk genre unlike the mess that CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077 created last year. Yup, I’m talking about the multiplatform isometric-view ARPG The Ascent.
Set on an alien, dystopian (and of course cyberpunk) world called Veles, the game takes place in an arcology (basically a gigantic, city-sized building) where players are a low-level indent pulled into investigating a conspiracy (like any good cyberpunk-title would, I guess). The main storyline has the player character working for different factions but basically you’ll spend a fair bit of time shooting up a lot of baddies.
The arcology is huge, and there’s plenty of ground to traverse. Thankfully there are a several in-game niceties to help you with the commute. First up, a handy key-press tells you how far is the mission objective (thankfully in metric measurements), and remember when I mentioned that arcologies are city-sized buildings? What do modern cities and the Ascent have in common? A functioning subway AND taxis, both of which allow for fast-travel!
Combat is a frantic and messy affair with a plethora of weapons to be equipped. You maybe an indent, but it seems your inventory holds no bounds to the amount of weapons and gear that you can be packing but you are only allowed to swap between 2 weapons and 2 augmentations (more on that later) at any point of time.
The different weapon types allow for ballistic, explosive or energy damage and sometimes it is important to pause the game to rummage through your inventory to get that digital shotgun to blast a really annoying mech. Augmentations allow for additional offensive or defensive capabilities, the first one that I’m using allows for a couple of spider droids to appear and attack enemies, while the second augmentation provides a missile barrage.
While combat can be frantic, enemies have level indicators on them and these can be very handy if you are just walking around and want to avoid higher level opponents. Missions are also conveniently labelled as to what would be the adequate player level to-be before plunging in head-on. The side-missions are also varied. One had me growing and harvesting some sort of vegetation on behalf of a pharmacist(?) at a flooded part of town infested with ferals, while the current one I’m on involves sabotaging a speeder.
Not only do you get to arm your indent, you get to dress him/her up too. Clothing/armor items mean picking something for the head, torso and legs and once you get pass the basic stuff, picking the right items would mean extra protection and/or mobility. You also get a cyberdeck, a device that helps your indent hack to terminals and some of the locked boxes that you can find hidden in corners.
As an ARPG, you gain XP by shooting up enemies and completing missions. You get skill points each time you gain enough XP to go up a level, and these points can be assigned to a bunch of attributes which among other things, affect how much hit points you have, your aim and also your weapons reload speed.
Before heading out, visiting major “town” areas within the game (and these will have a green background in your mini-map), where no-one would shoot at you, will give you access to vendors who sell weapons, armor and tactical items like grenades or provide services such as weapons upgrades, item transmogrification, and plastic surgery.
The Ascent is made for consoles and controllers in mind, but it will still be perfectly playable with a mouse-and-keyboard on the PC. I’ve to add that it looks totally amazing on the PC with the neon-lit graphics in the habitable areas of the arcology a showcase of what a cyberpunk game should really look like. I’m running the game on a rig powered by the Ryzen 7 5800X, Nvidia GTX 1070, 32 GB of RAM and Windows 10. Couldn’t be happier.
Nineoverten.com rates The Ascent at a 8/10 and together with Sable, are my choices for 2021 GOTY. The game is available on Game Pass for the Xbox Series X|S and is available on Steam as well for the PC.
