The Ascent - Cyber Warrior Pack

The Ascent is a top-down, twin-stick action RPG set inside a sprawling cyberpunk megastructure called Veles, where every human being is effectively corporate property. The Ascent Group, the mega-corporation that owns the city and everyone in it, suddenly collapses, and you are a low-rung worker grunt trying to survive the power vacuum. It is a premise with genuine potential: corporate dystopia, class warfare baked into the architecture, neon-soaked streets layered vertically like a society that never learned to stop building upward. The worldbuilding has real atmosphere, and for the first few hours this place feels alive in a way that a lot of isometric games never manage. The combat is the obvious selling point, and it earns its reputation. Guns feel punchy, enemy ragdolls are satisfying, and the ability to duck behind cover while independently aiming adds a small tactical layer that separates it from pure bullet-spray chaos. You can equip augmentations that modify how you play - area-of-effect crowd suppressors, biotic damage types, mobility options - and mixing these with your weapon loadout creates some genuinely fun build experimentation in the early and mid game. The Cyber Warrior Pack adds cosmetic and gear content on top of the base game, giving you a few extra tools to play dress-up with your character before diving back into the firefights. Here is where I have to be honest, though. The RPG scaffolding is thin. Choices do not matter in any meaningful narrative sense. Dialogue is largely flavor text rather than decision space. The quest design leans heavily on fetch structures - go here, kill this group, bring this item back - and the writing, while competent at world-level lore, rarely does anything interesting with individual characters. If you come in expecting Shadowrun Returns levels of narrative crunch, you will be disappointed. The skill tree exists and provides incremental power bumps, but it does not reshape how you play the way a deeper system would. Co-op is where the game finds its best version of itself. Running the neon corridors with up to three friends turns the repetition into background noise, because the chaos becomes shared and therefore fun in a different register. Solo, the padding is harder to ignore. The mid-game especially stretches missions across environments you have already cleared, and the XP curve can slow to a crawl right when the story should be accelerating. For a game built around corporate grind as its thematic backdrop, it is a little on-the-nose that it sometimes makes you grind to feel the grind. Visually, The Ascent is genuinely impressive. The pixel-art-adjacent aesthetic at this resolution and lighting quality is a real achievement from a small team, and Veles rewards just walking around and looking at things. The ambient sound design does a lot of heavy lifting too. If you are the kind of player who can treat an action RPG as a mood rather than a story, this game delivers consistently on that front. If you need the RPG half to pull its weight equally with the action half, you will find it wanting. Worth picking up if you have a co-op partner and an appetite for loud, stylish corridors. Approach solo with calibrated expectations.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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