written by Jih-Wei Peng
When I sat down to begin writing this preview my Spotify playlist happened to start blasting “Sixteen Tons,” which seems appropriate for a game depicting a dystopian future in which the collapse of an exploitative mega-corporation is greeted with cries of horror from the indentured masses as their already miserable existence seem set to get more miserable yet.
Aha. Future. Yes.
Developer Neon Giant’s upcoming Xbox Series X game, The Ascent, is set on the planet of Veles in The Ascent Group arcology, a corporate fief in which workers are brought from across the galaxy to live and die for the Ascent Group corporation. This happy state of affairs suddenly goes south when the corporation itself mysteriously shuts down, leaving the workers without direction, security enforcers without paychecks, automated security going haywire and nearby rival corporations and criminal syndicates sharpening their knives for a hostile takeover in the most literal sense.
You, the player, are somehow caught up in these events and are thus tasked with figuring out what exactly happened to the corporation, fending off invaders both corporate and criminal, and maybe, just maybe, somewhere along the way helping the arcology itself become a new and independent polity free of outside corporate influence.
Whether this brings about a meaningful improvement to the lives of the “indents”, as the corporate slaves are called, is up to your imagination and the optimism of the game’s writers, but then life is more about the journey than the destination and your journey seems set to have plenty to distract you from the systemic excesses of unbridled capitalism in a cyberpunk future, both in real life and in the game.
The Ascent is a twin-stick action-RPG of the Diablo vein, allowing you to wander around the shattered streets of the arcology cutting down a steady stream of baddies with your choice of futuristic firepower and special augmented abilities and collecting all the goodies that pop out of their mangled corpses. A look at the gameplay reveals a pleasant mix of special abilities – energy shields, homing missiles, grenades aplenty, fast dashes, and most spectacular of all, a rocket-assisted smash jump that shatters the enemy and the ground he’s standing on, leaving a spectacular mess for the arcology’s already-overworked street cleaners to handle whenever they can do their jobs without fear of lead poisoning. And that’s just what was shown in the available gameplay footage – more cyberware modifications and customizations are promised for those who want to go full chrome and make themselves as much of a weapon as the guns they wield.
Combat appears pleasantly smooth – while some foes are tougher than others they generally aren’t bullet sponges, and when combined with your selection of movement abilities firefights become flowing affairs of movement and firepower, seguing from a burst of lasers into a destructive rocket jump into a rapid dodge out of the way of incoming fire until you end your ballet of violence atop a pile of corpse, ready to move on to the next spot of ultraviolence. Co-op with up to three friends has been promised for local and online multiplayer, calling forth the possibility of either yet more beautiful coordinated action or utter chaos, both of which I for one find perfectly acceptable.
The Ascent doesn’t have a confirmed launch date yet, though it’s set to be released sometime this year on both Steam and Xbox via Microsoft’s “Smart Delivery” feature. With any luck the pandemic won’t have destroyed the global economy by then, allowing us to experience an escapist adventure into a world in ruins. Fingers crossed!