RISE ABOVE

THE ASCENT is a quality action-RPG set in a mind-blowing cyberpunk city

- Andy Kelly

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT?

A cyberpunk action RPG with guns, lots of guns

EXPECT TO PAY

£25

DEVELOPER

Neon Giant

PUBLISHER

Curve Digital

REVIEWED ON

RTX 2080 Super, Intel i7-9700K, 16GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER

Yes

LINK

curve-digital.com

Along with thousands of other galactic migrants, your character in The Ascent pays a small fortune for a ticket to the planet Veles, looking for a better life. The moment you step off the ship, however, the price of the ticket becomes a debt so astronomical that you’ll die before you can pay it off.

Even so, the company that owns the city you now call home, the Ascent Group, wants its pound of flesh. You are now an indent – slang for an indentured servant – working dirty, dangerous jobs to pay it off.

The Ascent’s setting, a mix of neon-flecked ’80s cyberpunk and grimy science fiction, is magnificent. The story takes place in an Arcology – a self-contained city squeezed into an immense skyscraper.

Think Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, crossed with Akira’s Neo Tokyo, and populated by the aliens from the Mos Eisley cantina. It’s an urban crush of tight-knit markets, bustling plazas, and concrete valleys buzzing with streams of flying cars.

It’s a hell of a setting, and one of the most compelling cyberpunk worlds on PC. But what do you actually do in it? Well, The Ascent is an action RPG, with an emphasis on the action, that you can play alone or with up to three friends in co-op.