The Ascent

The Ascent drops you into Veles, a sprawling mega-city run entirely by a megacorp called The Ascent Group. You are an Indent, essentially corporate property at the bottom of the food chain, and when the corp collapses without warning, you get dragged into a power vacuum full of rival gangs, shady fixers, and creatures that very much want you dead. It is a cyberpunk premise that knows its genre tropes well, and the world-building communicates most of its lore through environmental density rather than exposition dumps. Walking through the neon-soaked lower arcologies, past holographic advertisements and stacked shanty housing, genuinely feels like someone built the world first and wrote the story second. That is both a strength and a flaw. As an action RPG, The Ascent sits closer to twin-stick shooter than deep-systems RPG. You have a primary weapon, an augment slot for active skills, and a modest stat spread covering things like Cybernetics, Motorics, and Biochecks. The build variety is real but not enormous. You can lean into high-damage shotgun builds, run a kiting style with SMGs and crowd-control augments, or go heavy on melee-adjacent knockback augments. Past hour 15 or so the system starts to show a ceiling. There is not much reason to revisit earlier choices, and re-speccing never feels dramatic. For players coming in from Diablo-style ARPGs or even something like Cyberpunk 2077, the RPG layer will feel deliberately shallow. That said, the combat moment-to-moment is satisfying. You can crouch behind cover, aim over it manually to adjust your hit angle, and chaining kills with augment cooldowns has a rhythm to it once you find your build. Co-op, either local or online up to four players, is where the game breathes best. Enemy density scales up, chaos increases, and the visual spectacle of four Indents lighting up a corridor with laser rifles and grenade spam is genuinely fun. Solo, the experience is fine but the difficulty spikes feel more punishing and some of the boss encounters drag. The mission design, which is the game's biggest problem regardless of player count, relies too heavily on sending you back to locations you have already cleared with the same enemy spawns reset. There are filler fetch runs here that would make a lesser reviewer reach for the word "padding," and I am not a lesser reviewer, so I will just say that Neon Giant clearly ran out of quest variety somewhere around the midgame and hoped the atmosphere would carry things. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does not. What consistently holds up is the art direction. Veles is one of the better-realized cyberpunk settings in recent gaming, and the level of environmental detail in the lower city districts especially rivals productions with far larger budgets. The writing for individual characters is serviceable but rarely remarkable. The main story resolves without much emotional weight, which stings given how much implicit lore the world clearly has sitting underneath it. If Disco Elysium taught us anything, it is that cyberpunk despair hits hardest when the writing makes you care about the people crushed by the system. The Ascent gestures at that but does not commit. You finish the campaign having enjoyed yourself without feeling like the story paid off the setting's promise. The Ascent is worth your time if you like twin-stick shooters with RPG seasoning and a genuinely beautiful cyberpunk world to run through. Go in expecting looter-shooter vibes with light stat management and co-op fun, not a narrative RPG with meaningful choices. Adjust expectations accordingly and you will probably have a good time. Expect BG3-level systems depth or storytelling ambition and you will be disappointed.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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