The Ascent - Game Discussion

I do think there is some weird RNG going on with that last mission because I barely ever died playing the game. I had a set of abilities I used throughout that worked both against crowds and single bosses and was able to breeze through most encounters. In that final segment with the 4 terminals the amount of enemies being spawned seemed broken. At one point I had about 10-20 of the feral elites that lunge at you and launch missiles show up out of nowhere on top of everything else. I ended up beating it because on that attempt it spawned about half as many ferals and there were bigger pauses between waves as I hacked the terminals.

I mean with everything else I experienced in the Ascent it’s not shocking that something was out of whack. If I quit back to the menu and reloaded it would have probably been a different story. I remember finishing 3/4 of a main story mission without encountering a single baddie cause the game just stopped spawning them but all the checkpoints and story triggers worked just fine.

I'm really enjoying the game but that frickin' map is complete garbage.

Finished it last night after about 13 hours on PC Gamepass. I luckily didn't run into a lot of issues beyond some really rough performance stuff on very specific visual effects (Dropping to about 5FPS on some explosion particle effects etc.).

Overall I think I enjoyed the gameplay, world and visual design, but in terms of the story I felt like I was waiting for the story to really kick off all the way to the credits. All the characters just felt very generic and formulaic and because there aren't any choices to speak of, I felt like my character was just being swept along the whole way.

There is some pretty rough damage type modifiers in play also that make certain sections pretty rough if you don't happen to have a decent weapon for it (about 3/4 through the game I definitely had to dump most of my upgrade mats into an energy weapon for robits).

As a tip for later parts, when in doubt spawn more spiderbots.

Finished the game last night with somewhere between 15-20 hours played. I split play time about evenly between the Series X and PC (Game Pass version). It definitely played better on console but I had very few issues on PC. I’m pretty pleased with the relatively lean runtime, as I feel like I didn’t get tired of the game yet by the end. I do wish it had implemented classes or something, because I feel no urge to replay it.

Final boss was pretty tough but there were breaks in the enemy waves where I had just enough time to hold the button. I just popped the mechsuit for the final button because I didn’t want to wait, and it made the final cutscene pretty silly-looking. Thanks to this thread for the tip!

Lastly: spiderbots.

A few more hours into the game now and I am loving it. The world is just so rich and full of detail. It blows my mind that the studio is just like eleven people. I've gotten better at reading the map so it's not really a problem anymore although it still sucks.

@spliffmaster: Someone hacked the camera in the game and did a street level first person walkthrough and the levels look amazing - better than some modern third person games. It’s surprising how much detail they put in it considering how high the camera usually is.

@humanity: Yeah I saw that. Pretty dope.