I wish there was an on the fence option for recommendations. The Ascent is a visual feast with fantastic atmosphere and solid soundtrack. This game unfortunately suffers from what many smaller studios suffer from: lack of polish.


- World is very detailed
- Combat can be quite engaging
- Music was enjoyable
- Good amount of lore for the world and characters
- Decent but not huge amount of variance in guns/abilities


- Multiple crashes and freezes throughout my playthrough
- Got repeatedly stuck on random bits of terrain
- Game does not allow manual saves and relies on auto saves
- Spawn points after death can be fairly tedious due to aforementioned the auto saves
- Enemies have a tendency to spawn of out nowhere and shoot you from rooms you've just cleared
- Enemies can shoot you from offscreen
- Story was forgettable

All in all, it feels like the game could have been much better with more time to bake as the issues really hampered the experience for me. I cannot recommend this game at full price, but if it is on sale it may be worth a try. Given what we've seen from the studio in this game, I am looking forward to what their next game will be. If they can shore up the downsides, I think have the potential to make something really special.

The fiancee loves it more than me and I was the one who forced her to play it...

i) Gorgeous and impeccable visuals, art design and aesthetics.


i) Convoluted, badly paced and poorly written story. Awkward dialogues and frequent grammatical and spelling errors.

ii) Combat mechanics are decent at their core but suffer from a lack of depth. The game relies on a cover system which is useless half the time because enemies are spawned in out of nowhere right behind wherever you take cover. Boss fights are poorly designed with frustrating mechanics.

iii) Movement is poorly designed, the game lacks sprinting/running for some godforsaken reason and you're forced to spam dodges which you can't even do constantly because of cooldowns. Navigation is tedious and fast travel systems are still inconvenient. The map is horribly clustered with a confusing layout making it hard to use.

iv) Glitchy and buggy, faced multiple instances of enemies despawning which forces you to reload checkpoints (which are also awkwardly placed to ensure the maximum possible inconvenience for the player).

v) Very bad performance, constant stuttering even on a powerful rig. Tried messing around with the settings and looking up fixes online but nothing helped. The game is an utterly embarrassing technical state almost four years from launch.

This game has absolutely nothing going for it aside from its visuals. Every other aspect of the game ranges from mediocre to painfully bad. Would not recommend this game whatsoever unless you REALLY want to look around the world and even then only on a massive discount.