I like to go into games cold but this is a game where you *need* to know a bunch of things before you start playing or you will probably have a *really* bad time.

It has so many game-breaking issues and inconsistencies that I found the experience infuriating. Had I been prepared maybe I wouldn't have gotten so screwed over by the game.

These problems are so widespread and varied that it is clear that the problems go deep into the development of the game so I'm not entirely surprised that they stopped fixing it.

You can find a ton of threads about broken quests. Some of them may be actually impossible to complete, but in my experience they actually just have hidden requirements that it doesn't tell you about. The quest markers will take you to the corner of an empty room or an elevator that you cannot interact with and will never explain why. So side quests are not worth pursuing unless you happen to already be right next to them.

The dodge-roll mechanic locks you into an animation, and you cannot control your movement until it completes, even if you hit something early. And you will run into a lot of map detritus and catch the edges of every corridor and stop dead, leaving you easy pickings for enemies. There also seems to be some kind of stamina mechanic that has no visual indicator that I can find. Just sometimes if you dodge a couple of times in a row then you can't dodge again for a few seconds. Maybe it's just a bug. No idea.

You cannot rotate the camera, yet "foreground" objects can black your vision of your character, enemies, and items and may or may not give you an x-ray outline, so you *will* often be shooting at things you cannot see. Getting the looter augment is a requirement because it can see things blocked by other objects, yet it will often sit there and do nothing unless you are basically right on top of an item already.

The quest path helper will often break. Lead you down long indirect routes instead of direct ones. It will suddenly stop working at all because you are "within" the mission circle but the mission event cannot trigger until you realize that you are actually 100m above or below the correct area.

The map is nearly useless. Most of the time you will be completely blocked from seeing anything that helps you navigate beyond "north-ish I guess??" because there is no way to tell what is walkable versus a wall or decoration. I spent a lot of time hugging the left wall to find my way around obstacles. Doors and stairs and elevators are not shown. It is often impossible to tell if two areas are connected or just happen to be next to each other.

There is a weapon upgrade mechanic, which I think is related to the components you pick up? When you get to a gunsmith some guns will cost more or less to upgrade and you will have more or less in your inventory to pay for them. The cost does not seem related to the tier of weapon and the inventory can show vastly different amounts of components(?) available and they all may or may not decrease for all (or some) guns at the same time. I have literally no idea what the mechanic is here or if it is a bug or what.

Everything in the game is very expensive. So maybe you'll get excited to collect 5k units early on. This will not buy you very much. It's 5 trips in a taxi or two and a half pieces of cosmetic clothing. This isn't really a bug, but the prices do not make a lot of sense. For a game that is so sprawling with long routes everywhere, making fast travel so expensive is really punishing early in the game. There's also a train, but it only goes to a handful of other stations.

You will deal with hordes of enemies, which could be fine. A normal combat involves killing 10+ enemies. You might only see a couple, but as soon as one is aggro'd or killed a dozen more or will spawn *behind you*. And enemies will pop up everywhere on your route from one place to another. At some point the game starts spawning "bounties". Which are random named enemies that spawn in groups with heavier support. You cannot approach this as a mission based action RPG. It is more like vampire survivors without getting all the cool abilities constantly, that happens to have a rigid story structure bolted onto it. If you go into it with this in mind, you may have a better time.

Just remembered something else. The game puts your character low on the screen. So enemies that are "below" the screen can shoot you and you can't see them at all. You cannot rotate the camera.

The game has two different names for your attributes. Like "Frame" and "Lower Body" I'm pretty sure are the same thing. But displayed as different things in different areas of the game. I have no idea why the inconsistency or why they didn't just stick with the very clear head/upper/lower/internal names. I didn't see an explanation for how they work either, but it seems that as you put more points into your skills, like Evade for example, you also increase the associated attribute, like Frame/Lower Body, possibly at a rate of like 2:1 or something. And there's 2 skills for each attribute which contribute to it. I also didn't see an explanation for what the attributes themselves do, but uh they are there for some reason I hope.

A yellow flag for me early on was noticing that some places that teleport you to an "interior" area required a button press to pass through while others loaded as soon as you approached the door. This tiny thing told me that my overall experience was probably going to be rough and inconsistent too.

If you are on controller the menus are navigated with up and down on the d-pad or left analog stick, but right and left takes you to a completely different screen - even though menus are laid out left-to-right. Most games use the shoulder buttons or triggers to change screens. Why they made this choice is mystifying.

They also put your grenades on the left analog thumbstick press. The particular controller I've been using doesn't have any issues with triggering it accidentally, but a lot of controllers I've used in the past would have a problem with this. It would make way more sense to put crouch on one of the thumbsticks instead of dedicating the rightmost face button to it, and use that for your grenades instead. Again, completely bizarre choice.

If I hadn't spent hours trying to complete impossible missions or being ganked by 20 baby yodas with mortars and RPGs on my way to a quest marker through a labyrinth of samey cyberpunk scenery that I might have spent more time reading the 500 tutorial sections in the codex, and that might have clarified some points, but the ones I did read did not do a very good job of explaining anything. Sometimes codex entries would appear hours after you had been using something. Like right around 8 hours of gameplay it finally unlocked a codex entry about money.

Aside from that... the lore is fun, the visuals are very "Fallout 1 if it was made in Unreal and based off of Blade Runner" (but expect an incredible amount of hitching/framedrops), the voice acting is good but rarely seems to match up with the look of the characters, cut scene visuals go way harder than necessary, if you are into very blatant cyberpunk references you will find them all here. There is an earnest attempt at worldbuilding, despite how derivative it is, and I appreciate the diverse cast of aliens - given cyberpunk is often just humans and computers. As far as a top-down twin-stick shooter the combat is okay. The trailer implies that more interesting items get unlocked eventually, but after almost 9 hours I ran out of patience.

Some people find it easier to overlook the issues, but I managed to run into more than I could tolerate. I guess I can hope for a community patch some day but I can't recommend anyone buy the game. Honestly I think this game could be really good, so I'm sad to downvote it. I got this for free as a gift, but even free it's just not worth the stress headache.

The Ascent shines through Veles, a vibrant and atmospheric cyberpunk planet. Exploring the carefully crafted environment easily becomes a time sink, with the world constantly tempting you to see what lies just beyond the next corner. Twin-stick combat feels responsive and fluid, with a wide range of weapons and augmentations encouraging experimentation. That said, some of the game’s camera angles can feel a bit clumsy.

Pro's:
Amazing atmosphere
Great soundtrack
good enemy variety
Hidden items / upgrades gives you motivation to search the whole map
Souls-likeish combat (until you find some crazy hidden weapons)
Good Gun Variety

Neutral:
Voice acting could be better but not aweful
Wish it had more melee options (One base game, three more with dlc)

Cons:
Occassional crashes (at the time of this review ive experienced about 5 crashes total)
Quest markers glitch here and there (can be reset by returning to the central area)
Huge difficulty spike boss early in the game, gives you a bit of shell shock (other bosses are still good and not nearly as hard)

Overall:
Id recommend this game if you into cyberpunk souls likes, i paid full price for the game and the DLC given the time ive put in im happy with my purchase but it couldnt hurt to wait for a sale to really get your money's worth.
With this review being posted i still have a few side quests to finish, and few more items to loot from the map. Id guestimate to 100% the game itd take about 30 - 40 hrs depending on how fast you want to move!