 So I put up a poll to decide the next video and surprisingly the winner was YF4 is better than it gets credit for. I'm in the midst of replaying that now and I'll get to that video next week. The very close runner up was The Ascent. Now I'm finished playing The Ascent and my thoughts will only take a short while so today you're going to get my opinion on a game that is pretty divisive. Major review outlets have called it the best game of the year and many players have called it a buggy mess of contradicting designs. So what do I think about The Ascent? It's a buggy mess of contradicting designs. At its best it's decent and at its worst it's stupid. Grading on a curve. I've pointed out before that when you read reviews from big media outlets you have to always take into account the indie AAA grading curve they all employ. Celeste, a fun little platformer, is somehow one of the best rated games in history while Remnant from the ashes gets a 76. Three games get a bonus for being indies. AAA games get a bonus for huge pointless production values and AA games get screwed. The Ascent is tailor made to review well because it's an isometric game made by a tiny developer in a period when almost nothing good has released in months. When you add in the things that The Ascent really excels at being the things that reviewers seem to really care about you get a game that reviews much better with the media than with its players. One of the big reviews I read called it an arcade shooter which is nonsensical. An arcade shooter is by definition one which doesn't have slowly walking around as 60% of its gameplay. But the game is being treated as if it's a lean little indie when actually it's a bloated mess of an RPG. Before we get into all that why precisely is The Ascent such a critical darling? Simple. It looks pretty. Look at the ray tracing. The Ascent is one of the better looking games around. It has a huge, almost ludicrous amount of detail in its environments and the ray tracing actually impresses in a cyberpunk themed game. Of course that ray tracing means explosions drop the frame rate into the 40s even with an 8800K RTX 2070 super setup but you know things are often very pink if that's a big deal for you. I don't want to understate what the developers have accomplished here. It's pretty obvious where most of the development effort went in The Ascent. They have crafted a large open world city that is fully explorable and soaked in minute detail. With tons of explorable buildings, streets littered with people and garbage and stunning sky boxes The Ascent is an absolute success from a strict art design perspective. The game is gorgeous, the lighting is impressive and the story is actually pretty good. The problems arise with how that huge beautiful open world interact with the gameplay. One of the perfect examples of the poorly thought out gameplay loop is this. You can't sprint in The Ascent. I mean it was obviously very important to the devs that you look realistic as you slowly jog across this huge map following broken waypoints to the next mission. But somewhere along the line somebody realized that slowly jogging for 6 minutes across the map to the next mission was kind of tedious so they added minimal and inconvenient fast travel. You can take cabs to like 4 spots but they cost a thousand dollars. You can take a train but there's like one station in each zone and the map is a frustrating mess to navigate with its multiple levels. Each of these solutions to the problem of annoyingly long walking sections then comes with its own new problem. Take the subway? Okay, let's pull up the map and find it. Oh, the map is pure garbage. Well, I guess I can put a waypoint down on it. Oh, you can't interact with the map or put custom waypoints. Well, I guess I'll just make my way over there. Oh, it's actually on a level below me. Well, I guess I'll just find the stairs or whatever. Oh, the stairs aren't marked on the map at all and there's literally no legend to highlight things. Cool, another awesome example of this problem. So if you finally manage to get to the subway, you get to find that you literally have to wait on the platform for the train to come. And if you don't get right on, it leaves. Cool. I grew up in New York. If there's one thing a real life New Yorker would never want to fucking gamify, it's waiting for the subway. If only the game had some way to make my desk smell like piss, I get the whole real experience. That design choice to make you wait for the train, even if it's only 30 seconds is emblematic of the entire ethos behind this game. Everything, everything is pointlessly more annoying than it should be. And all of those annoying things end up interacting with each other to create cascading systems of interlocking annoyance. They morph into a new state of hyper annoyance. For instance, as I've made clear, slowly walking is a core design philosophy of the ascent. It's the central mechanic. If you love walking, holy crap, is this the game for you. But even the ascent couldn't fully commit to all walking all the time. They realized that even the most ardent supporters of slow walking would eventually get bored. This means something else has to happen while you walk. Hence, random enemy spawns. Now, that's fine. After two minutes of walking, I am ready to use my right hand for more even slowly massaging my temples to lower the building rage. Unfortunately, the sense is like, kinda an RPG? I mean, there's numbers and symbols that aren't clear and damage types that are not explained anywhere, and like, stat points and shit, so enemies have to have levels. Okay, that's fine. Obviously, there are two ways to deal with enemy leveling in a game. Either areas are leveled or enemy scale to the player to keep everything, you know, kind of consistent. Wrong. Enemy levels are random. So, you're four minutes into your slow walking and a group of level five enemies spawn in. You obliterate them and four minutes and 15 seconds later, a group of level one enemies spawns in. Then a group of level 15 enemies and a couple minutes before your destination, a group of level 25 enemies who are 10 levels above you spawn and kill you instantly. Now you respawn four minutes away again. Then you try again and this time it might be level 15 enemies at the end or it's the same and you keep trying until you eventually get there. Or, for instance, say you're 30 minutes into a mission when the game decides to spam you with a horde of enemies that you cannot beat. That's what happened the first time I quit playing the Ascent. In a mission, the final group of enemies was a true massive horde of dudes like eight levels above me. You cannot kill them before they kill you. Well, I guess I needed to level up, right? Well, that should be easy. I'll just go into the menu and spend the 10 skill points I've been building up, oh wrong. You can only level up at a vendor, cool. I guess I'll need to slowly walk all the way to a vendor, spend my skill points and start the mission over, nice. Or you can grind side missions that entail, mainly, slowly walking across the map killing random packs of enemies for 30 minutes. The Ascent is an RPG, but really the core of the game is two things, slowly walking across a huge fucking map and shooting hordes of enemies. I have already made clear that I am vehemently opposed to slowly walking being a gameplay mechanic. Luckily, I'm a huge fan of shooting things in the face, so let's talk about the face shooting side of the Ascent. It's average at best. Shoot the bad guys. I'm a simple man. I like my trucks big, my food bland, and my games violent. The Ascent does feature a healthy amount of simulated violence in a genre I've always loved. I am a big fan of twin stick shooters. I love Gunjin, Nuclear Throne, Isaac, Helldivers, you name it. If it uses two sticks to shoot things, I've probably played and loved it. If there's one game that the Ascent's combat is reminiscent of, it's House Mark's great little twin stick shooter, Alien Nation, which is actually an arcade shooter, by the way. Isometric, big guns, a bevy of abilities you choose from, heavy reliance on dash dodging, it's basically the exact same combat system with most of the same exact problems. Luckily, there's not an ammo economy in the Ascent, and they don't put reload on clicking the left stick, which is nice. But where House Mark is kind of like masters and making fast paced, fluid, bullet hell combat, feel fun, Neon Giant is not. Combat in any game is a fine balance of systems. The very best games have combat systems where everything perfectly snaps together. Neon Giant has some good abilities and gun feel, but everything surrounding that solid foundation is off. Why on Earth do any enemies in a game like this have hit scan weapons? Why on Earth is it cover based at all? The game seems to wanna lean into its one unique system, which is the ability to aim low or high to shoot over cover or stagger enemies, but then it floods the screen with mortar rounds or enemies that are way faster than the player. When the mobs are at or below your level, there is a fine, if kind of annoying dance of kiting dudes around pillars. But the second enemies get above a certain threshold, it is awful because the only choice is running away, slowly chipping them down until you're overwhelmed. Then there's healing. Simply adding an active healing system on cooldown would have vastly improved the combat by adding depth and survivability. Instead, healing can be done in one of three ways. You can buy it from a vending machine every so often, you can wait for random drops, or you can use a super ability that puts a slow stationary healing pylon on the ground. Oh, but the pylon heals enemies too. Oh, and it takes like five minutes to recharge it. It's just so badly thought out, so annoying and boring that even with decent shooting, half the fights are a slog and the other half are an infuriating mess with only a teeny tiny slice that are challenging and interesting. The game staggers from stupidly boring face roll to impossible difficulty spikes. It almost never actually feels good. Let's talk about those RPG elements. They're pointless. Poorly explains time wasting that's completely unnecessary. Don't fucking make me schlep across the map to level up, dude. Why? Why, why, why? What about the loot? Pointless, every weapon you pick up is exactly the same. They don't have random stats. They don't have different mods. If you have one Mark IV assault rifle, every other assault rifle drops at Mark IV and is exactly the same. So the weapons that drop are actually just money and the money is basically useless except for fucking caps and occasional abilities that you can buy, although those drop anyway. Finally, we can get to why I didn't finish the ascent. It is a broken buggy mess, man. Waypoints are just completely fucking busted. They'll disappear. They take you to the wrong place. Twice I had them take me on a long ass walk, only two after arriving at the waypoint fucking reverse itself and take me on another long walk back from where I came. I had several doors fail to open. A boss didn't spawn, thrice. I had a low level mission that I did and kept following the waypoints to turn it in only to have it end in the middle of the plaza. I did something I don't usually do and looked up a guide and I love this. You literally can't turn the quest in until after you've completed a mid-game main story mission. Why the fuck is it an early game level five quest then? Why isn't the game letting me know this? Why would it walk me across the whole fucking map multiple times? What the fuck, dude? Finally, there's something called a cyber deck that you use to like hack stuff like doors and chests and turrets. The game explains nothing about how this thing works. You'll have to figure it out yourself, which I did. I figured out that you level it up by finding items just plop down on the map. That's a little stupid. When you make me go to a vendor to level up, I mean, why not just have that, dude? Let me buy the cyber deck upgrades, but whatever, fine. So I found enough of these things to have the ability to open ice, two doors and chests and hack turrets. Somewhere along the way, I realized it was no longer hacking turrets, which was weird, but whatever. The turret hacking was pointless and useless anyway because you need to be right in front of the turret and guns work from a distance. Then I tried to hack an ice two chest and it didn't work. I got annoyed, but something came up to distract me. Probably a group of level 26 dudes that just plopped in the middle of the road on the way to a quest waypoint that required six tries to kill. Then I was looking in the menus and I noticed that somehow my cyber deck had reverted to only being able to open ice one doors and chests. I have no idea how this happened. I was pretty pissed and looked it up to find that there's enough upgrades and a few can be wasted, so fine. Then I found an ice one chest and it didn't work. Went to the menu, yeah, ice one, okay, and side note, there are no manual saves in the ascent. You have one save. Here's the main problem with this game. A, it's broken. B, it's boring. C, it's full of pointless time wasting design choices. Are you into a game that's more about dropping you in a world to just kind of exist and explore and absorb the story? Well, tough shit because half the game is shooting things. Are you into a deep, interesting, challenging combat system? Well, tough shit because the ascent is a shallow, boring, easy stomp, except when it's a shallow, boring, impossible mess. Are you into cool, intricate RPG systems? Tough shit because it's an RPG only in name. The game is beautiful and has surprisingly excellent voice acting and a ridiculous amount of lore and world building. If you're really into Codex entries to explain sci-fi tech babble, this is the game for you. But if you like deep RPGs, this isn't it. If you like tight, twin stick shooters, this is not for you. And if you don't like waiting for subway trains or slowly walking to broken waypoints or random, pointless difficulty spikes on the way to a quest boss that you then blow up with ease, this isn't for you. I think it might actually only be for reviewers at major media outlets because its biggest appeal is that it looks pretty. That's not good enough for me. That's not good enough for me in a woman. That's not good enough for me in a truck, but it is especially not good enough for me in a game. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.