The Ascent test: a successful first contract for Neon Giant, but with a few hiccups

While “tasting” AAA titles are preparing to surge after the summer, several more modest but particularly intriguing games come to liven up the hot season. This is particularly the case of The Ascent, the first game from Neon Giant, an independent studio made up of only twelve people, and published by Curve Digital. If it caught our attention and was among our most anticipated games of this month of July, it is in particular thanks to its cyberpunk atmosphere and its nervous action-RPG style in isometric view. It is also playable solo and in cooperation up to four. A meteoric rise for the young Swedish studio? Our answers in this test.

The Ascent therefore promises to be a title with a modest budget and workforce. The game is a Microsoft exclusive, sold for less than €30 on Steam, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and available on D-Day on the Game Pass. Either way, welcome to Veles, a cross between the town of Blade Runner and the Star Wars universe that will ruffle your retinas, pull out some hair and send you pleasant adrenaline rushes.

The Ascent test: a successful first contract for Neon Giant, but with a few hiccups Read the conclusionThe Ascent

Veles, visually stunning in all aspects
A wonderfully sticky soundtrack with a cyberpunk vibe
A wide range of weapons and equipment to vary the pleasures
Nervous and enjoyable gameplay

Overall quite easy provided you develop your character well
A sadly hollow story and protagonists
Uninteresting main and side quests
Cumbersome city and menu navigation

Veles, the dystopian planet-city with two faces

Like Blade Runner, The Ascent opens up to us not through characters but through a plan highlighting the real star of this title: Veles. A dystopian city-planet dominated by mega-corporations that utterly crushes citizens – and players – under its gigantic majesty. Let's face it, Veles is absolutely sumptuous in every aspect. Sometimes dark and dirty, sometimes opulent and ostentatious, it constantly shimmers our retina thanks to magnificent lighting effects and a sense of detail that is madness.

Despite an often nervous action, The Ascent regularly opens up to silent contemplation and spoils us with breathtaking shots. However, to take advantage of it in Ultra and ray-tracing activated (exclusively under DirectX 12) you will need to have a very solid PC configuration. Even with our RTX 3070 Ti, Ryzen 5 5600X and 32 GB of RAM, we encountered several violent jerks with these settings at 1440p, but which are clearly worth a look. By disabling ray-tracing, the game fortunately gains greatly in fluidity, slightly to the detriment of its intrinsic beauty.

Now let's go down a few blocks, and get to know the heart of the city: its inhabitants, and more particularly the "permas". Veles stands at a crossroads, attracting many travelers of both human and extraterrestrial species from a vast galaxy to remake their lives within it. Most of them land and are immediately conscripted by the mega-corporations in presence, in order to earn their place as true citizens. Understand by this that these optimistic newcomers to Veles are nothing more or less than slaves and will have to fight hard to obtain their freedom.

Our character, whose appearance we can modify with certain freedom, is therefore… a “perma”, in the pay of Ascent, the most powerful mega-corporation in Veles. While carrying out a mission, as routine as it is dangerous, in the shallows of the arcology of Ascent, he learns that the corporation is the victim of a large-scale conspiracy.

“Height of luck”, it is up to us to take on the heavy task of clarifying this affair. At worst we will die in the process, making one less mouth to feed, at best it will serve our superiors well and we will earn some credits to spend at the bar, and why not an ascent in this vast food chain. An almost win-win plan, in short.

Cutting… in the budget

If the universe looks intriguing, it is unfortunately here that The Ascent encounters its first major flaw, due to a limited budget and team: the story and its protagonists. While the meaninglessness of little people's lives and our actions is a recurring theme in the cyberpunk genre, Neon Giant's game here takes the concept a bit too literally. The main and secondary quests are indeed too generic and the main protagonists are generally hollow and tasteless, starting with our character, who is and will remain a vulgar mute gun carrier sent from point A to point B.

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Dialogues that only serve as an exposition and unfortunately without much interest.

Throughout this adventure of fifteen hours of play, taking a little time (count less than ten hours in a straight line), we literally have the impression of shooting blanks and that our actions have no consequence on the world around us. We are however sent to the four corners of Veles with the aim of uncovering a vast conspiracy against the most powerful mega-corporation on the planet, but the city remains sadly unchanged, and the inhabitants we meet seem barely moved by the fact that we are slaughtering the enemy with all our might just a few meters from them.

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While we investigate a massive conspiracy operation, life goes on in Veles.

Another particularly damaging element: The Ascent is too talkative in his dialogues in an attempt to bring more depth to his universe. Each quest is thus accompanied by a long exposure that after a while we tend to pass, due to a cruel lack of involvement of the player and his character. Worse still, some secondary protagonists speak in a looping yogurt form that quickly turns out to be horrifying. The fault is undoubtedly a huge investment in the city and its atmosphere itself, to the detriment of history and immersion within it.

Gun runner

As you will have understood, our main occupation between two dialogues to fulfill this or that mission will therefore be to travel around the city and knock out almost everything that moves in our path.

Here, too, The Ascent presents a particularly troublesome problem: navigating the huge playground that is the Ascent arcology. It is indeed divided into several sectors, from the shallows to its Pinnacle. If it is possible, in the long term, to use the metro for free and the taxi against a few UCrédits within the same sector, we will have for a major part of the game as a means of transport only our modest mud crushers.

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The metro, a mix between means of transport and loading time.

Unfortunately, the sprinting implant appears to be out of stock across the planet—so that's a shame!—so we're wandering through various neighborhoods at a particularly slow speed. It is always possible to speed up the pace slightly by dodging, a method that is not the most… practical. This added to the need to follow quest after quest to display the diluted markers in a huge map can make progression and navigation in town very laborious.

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Unclear map and objective markers.

To come and break this slow but beautiful monotony in our peregrinations, we will very often meet fanatics seeing with an unwelcome look the arrival of our character in their flowerbeds. Fortunately, The Ascent signs in its gameplay a generally very successful and particularly pleasant performance, with the keyboard / mouse as with the joystick. The fights are always nervous, often enjoyable and sometimes even spectacular when we line up the enemies and chain the dodges thanks to the vast array of weapons and equipment in the game. It is also possible to take cover in the like a Gears of War to protect yourself from bullets flying in all directions.

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The fights are generally enjoyable and can be quite spectacular.

In the company of the good Nerces, we had the opportunity to go a long way in cooperation; an adventure that turned out to be quite enjoyable (and even more chaotic) despite some save sync bugs.

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Tourist trip to Veles with the good Nerces!

Unfortunately, there are a few small downsides: the shooting on the stairs which does not work or the artificial intelligence which tries to compensate for its simplicity by the number, apart from rare exceptions, without much success.

The boss fights are also very few and not necessarily interesting. Special mention, however, to the soundtrack of the game, which sometimes plays the card of the atmosphere, sometimes very dynamic to punctuate the fights in the most beautiful way.

In a dystopian future, better be well equipped

Beyond the fighting, The Ascent is pretty solid in its action-RPG component. As the adventure progresses, our character will level up, allowing us to invest points in talents such as hit points, critical hit chance, and others. Be careful however, you will have to choose in which talent to invest, the game does not ask you for confirmation before using a hard-earned point. These different talents are headed by four statistics that will impact the effectiveness of our character in different aspects, as well as the duration or power of the increases that we can equip.

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A particularly complete character sheet without being too complex.

These are divided into two active capacities and two passive capacities, and are sufficiently numerous to vary the pleasures. They require energy to be used as well as a more or less long recharge time. It will thus be possible to create interesting synergies, to summon allies or to make our weapons and our aim more effective.

The arsenal is also very complete, with various handguns, assault rifles, machine-guns, shotguns and heavy weapons such as rocket launchers or flamethrowers. It will be possible to improve them with components found around the world to increase their damage. In general, the weapons are divided into two categories: ballistic, more effective against organic enemies, and energy, very logically cut against mechanical enemies.

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The "Charcudoc" of The Ascent, allowing us to equip our augmentations and modify our appearance.

Of course, we will also find many pieces of armor for the head, torso and legs of our character, decked out with defensive statistics and increasing certain given talents. The opportunity to equip our character to better suit our style of play, although in reality we will simply tend to put on armor of a higher rarity, to the detriment of statistics, which are generally better, and sometimes of our appearance .

We also have various tactical equipment. Understand by this disposable or deployable objects with various effects, but in reality impractical because they take relatively long to recharge. Finally, cyberpunk obliges, we will find here and there an improvement of our cyberdeck, a tool allowing to hack doors, chests containing loot and distributors in order to recover care, energy or even money.

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Many vendors populate Veles in order to properly equip our character.

Beyond collecting all these elements from around the world, we have the possibility of improving our character and buying equipment through hubs scattered in different districts of Veles. It is therefore imperative between each main mission to take a tour through these hubs in order to develop our character and our equipment before returning to combat.

The Ascent: the opinion of JVFR

If this is a first attempt for the young Swedish studio Neon Giant, it is unfortunately not totally a masterstroke. For an action-RPG in isometric view, however, it fulfills its part of the contract very well in the most important aspects, namely its nervous and chaotic gameplay, or its management of the character. It even goes so far as to shine in the art direction of Veles, simply magnificent, especially thanks to the sumptuous lighting effects that have constantly amazed us. The soundtrack also perfectly accompanies the action phases as well as the quieter moments.

Unfortunately, The Ascent fishes on a few aspects that tarnish this superb picture, starting with a story and protagonists who fall flat, making our character a simple gun carrier. As mentioned earlier, the laborious navigation in the city and the lack of clarity of the map also seriously taint the experience. Finally, the game presents little challenge, with a few exceptions, the fault of a somewhat strawberry artificial intelligence.

All in all, The Ascent is an enjoyable experience at a bargain price that we'd definitely recommend to lovers of cyberpunk and fast-paced action conducive to some heady adrenaline rushes. If The Ascent's ending suggests a sequel, we wish Neon Giant a budget and manpower ascension to polish up the few strays of their very first game, to give us a deeper adventure than they are unquestionably capable of. to lavish.

The Ascent

The first title from the Swedish independent studio Neon Giant, The Ascent is a vibrant tribute to the cyberpunk genre, with a magnificent dystopian city, and a good action game in isometric view thanks to a really enjoyable gameplay. Unfortunately, its story, its characters and a few mistakes somewhat tarnish a picture that is otherwise very pleasant to contemplate.