As a rickety freight elevator carries me down into the grimy, industrial bowels of an anti-arcology, I realise that The Ascent is a by-the-numbers cyberpunk dystopia. I play a mere cog in the corporate machine, contractually locked into a life of servitude, executing thankless tasks across the city such as pest extermination and machine repair. I'm stuck doing this until my contract is served or I die.
But there's something to be said for doing the classics well. The Ascent is a visually striking, oppressive action shooter. The first area is an entanglement of swelling pipes, ramshackle wire cobwebs, and whirring machinery. Cockroaches scuttle away as I approach the corpse of a dead engineer. It’s a very grim place to be, and it only gets more wretched as I explore.
This impressively bleak cyberpunk exterior hides the fact that The Ascent has the bones and guts of a Diablo-style action-RPG. The camera is fixed in an isometric position. Occasionally I’m asked to duck under beams or hack into terminals to pass through gates, but other than that, exploration feels similar to navigating the subterranean caverns and dungeons of Sanctuary.
RELATED LINKS: Best cyberpunk games, Games like Diablo, Best RPG games
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