I wasn’t necessarily going to do a write-up about Ascendant going into open beta. But, after playing it for a little bit, I wanted to get my thoughts out on paper.
To begin with, I didn’t know much about Ascendant before booting it up. It’s a pretty blatant arena shooter with a first-person perspective. If you’re familiar with Overwatch, Apex Legends, Valorant, or any of the countless variations of them, you’re familiar with this genre. I’ve been into shooters since the 90s, but especially Halo since it originally launched in the early 2000s.
I got the email about Ascendant, which promised an OG Beta Outfit when it hits Early Access eventually, and an OG Beta Avatar Icon for now. It’s on Steam and through their website. So, after a quick installation, I was underway.
The first thing I need to take note of about Ascendant is that there is absolutely no controller support. If I were scoring this, that’d knock massive points off right off the bat. A first-person shooter game should always allow people to use a controller, but Ascendant doesn’t make that clear unless you see it on your Steam page.
Ascendant brings as much cringe as it can in the first moments of the game.
From the get-go, they make it very clear that they’re going for a 1980s aesthetic. You’re greeted with the cringiest intro in the history of gaming. I’m a millennial who grew up in the early 2000s. I wear cringe on my sleeve and I blushed from embarrassment every time anyone opened their mouth in Ascendant.
Once you’re through the intro for the Ascendant beta, you’re greeted by a live-action human in the worst wig since Oliver Queen’s island sequences on the show Arrow. He spews random insults, cusses a handful of times for effect, and then literally walks off in the middle of the recording. It was, as you can expect, also very cringy. The entire thing felt like it was right out of 1993’s Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, and not in a good way.
The story of Ascendant seems to take a page from various sources. Your character, whoever you are, has been in a cryogenic coma for 1200 years, apparently. It feels like a mixture of Demolition Man in premise, but they tried to make that into Fallout.
They handwave the joke about overshooting the timeframe by 1000 years to try to explain why there are monsters in Ascendant. But, as mentioned, everything has a 1980s aesthetic for no discernible reason and they don’t actually explain any of it. The lore seems to be just a flimsy way to explain why everyone has hair metal hair, perms, and crop tops.
You create a character. I understand not having a lot of options due to beta, but the models are pretty ugly in this build. I do like that, like the actual 1980s, the same clothing is available for any gender to wear.
They force the tutorial on you at the beginning, which explains the basics of the game and what to do. It’s fine that they do that, but it’s a requirement and cannot be opted out.
The game has you hunt down biocore canisters that power… something? Again, they handwave the lore pretty much anytime they try to explain what you’re supposed to do. The idea is to face off against other teams of three while also battling random, easily avoidable monsters that have more health than you have bullets. Don’t waste your time fighting the creatures since they’re slow anyway and won’t be a problem.
The game brings nothing new to the table except for the slowest gameplay I’ve ever seen in a shooter.
There’s nothing super special about the gameplay. If you know shooters, you’ve already played it. You can earn a special ability that doesn’t really get explained well to you during the tutorial and I feel like I miss my mark every time.
The canisters are just a slow “payload” type of functionality. You have to guard them until it hits 100%, but it takes multiple minutes and you’re a sitting duck while you wait for it. I legitimately watched players from other teams notice me waiting and run by because they knew that I wasn’t going anywhere and they could just shoot me as soon as it was done.
If you’re lucky enough to get to 100% without being bombarded with gunfire, you pick up the canister and have to haul it across the map to your starting point again and then wait until it hits 100% again the same way. It’s incredibly slow and you will absolutely die trying to do it because everyone was waiting for you to finish so they don’t have to do it themselves.
Speaking of slow, the maps are so giant with so little to do that most of your playtime is going to be walking with no one else around you. Your sprint isn’t automatically turned on, but even that is slower than Halo’s non-sprint, walk speed. The second you find another person to shoot, you’re probably already dead.
Listen, I’m a cozy gamer as well. I don’t mind being slow in some games. But, in a shooter like Ascendant, I want fast, twitch-based controls. The slog of a walking simulator does not work in an FPS and I can’t stress how much I could have actually napped between a death and getting to the action again. Or the multiple minutes of sitting and expecting to be shot while trying to get a canister.
Yes, there are vehicles to try to help with speed randomly placed around the map, but they really don’t do much for you. They barely work in this build and catching yourself on any wall, even slightly, means you might as well get out and walk anyway.
Final Verdict: At least they get a participation trophy for trying
The intro claims that the maps in Ascendant change in every match. If they did, it was subtle because my first matches had basically the same layout. I didn’t notice because the map is so big and the matches go on for so long.
You can occasionally catch 80s-themed music in the game, specifically in the neon main hub area, which is interesting. But, that entire area feels like a mess. It’s hard to navigate, NPCs repeat the same line of dialogue over and over like they’re from a PlayStation 2 game, and noises fight for dominance over each other.
All around, the experience was, as the kids put it, mid. It reminded me a lot of the now-defunct Boss Key Productions games like Radical Heights or LawBreakers. I know this is the open beta, but they have a lot of balancing and changing to do before this game is actually playable.
Because the audio is so random, you’re going to get inundated with sex noises and jittery, cut-off dialogue throughout every match. Visually, the game looks fine if you aren’t moving, but it’s so jittery during gameplay and movement that it can hurt your eyes pretty badly. I left my session with a headache.
Oh, and I’m not touching this again until they offer controller support. Alas, my poor hands! It wasn’t great being forced to stretch to the “Y” key for some random reason!
You can play the Ascendant Open Beta yourself until August 4th through Steam or their website. If you’re looking for a shooter that I actually had fun with, you should read my review about Postal: Brain Damaged. While it isn’t perfect, it’d explain my taste in fast vs. slow shooter games.
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