The Ascent Thoughtlessly Regurgitates the Cyberpunk Aesthetic

As your cyberpunk operative moves through the planet Veles, the camera cuts away from them. It lingers on aliens and humans milling about at a bar or loitering in squalor. The standard isometric camera shifts to a profile view or expands to show the layered scale of its planetary city. The Ascent clearly wants the player to feel embodied, to feel like a small part of a larger community. Veles is dense, drenched in neon, hundreds of people hover in almost every area. It feels material as hundreds of wires string themselves on the street, snaking down to the power plants below the city. This is all surface shimmer. The deeper you go into Veles, the more districts you find, the more it feels like a hollow world. The Ascent is undeniably shaped by nearly every piece of cyberpunk media from years past. However, there is little reflection in the way it pulls neon and metal from its ancestors. It would be inaccurate and reductive to say that The Ascent does nothing with its plethora of sci-fi influences. What it does, though, is pretty damn boring.
To its credit, The Ascent doesn’t waste a lot of time. The opening cutscene zooms into “The Ascent Group arcology,” a miniature city within the massive planetary metropolis. Stacked white text reveals that you are an indentured servant, an “indent,” owned by a corporation, The Ascent Group, in exchange for transport to Veles. Then you leap right into the muck, restoring plumbing to your section of the city. However, the complete collapse of The Ascent Group interrupts your routine and you’ll have to dive into every part of the city to rebuild a life. Right away, the game gets convoluted with proper nouns and codex entries. You get notifications for every new location, character, or enemy. Luckily it’s all pretty snappy and the broad strokes are familiar. You are an exploited worker, caught between vast corporate forces, making your way through the only way you know how, through the barrel of a gun.
The thing is, all that immediate world building is simply backdrop for a rote twin-stick shooter. Though your Indent can gain augmentations and skill points and “tacticals” all of it has everything to do with shooting. The combat never really feels expressive, but it does feel like it can be optimized. Skill points upgrade critical hit chance or let you dodge slightly faster. The only ability outside of shooting is hacking, which is paper thin, the vestigial limb of what cyberpunk games should be. Though the game gestures at themes of labor and spends a lot of time establishing setting, it is all in service of simple shooter power fantasy. It’s not alone. Open world games from Assassin’s Creed to Watch Dogs glory in this kind of optimization. These are games not really about exploration or freedom, but about mastering a specific kind of play and conquering the world. The Ascent’s lively setting and large crowds are not enough to distract from the fact that it is an extremely normal videogame.