I have a favourite game from growing up – Crusader: No Remorse. It was a third person action shooter developed by Origin Systems in 1995 when every other game was a 3D quake clone. What hooked me with Crusader was the beautiful explosions and what kept me was the tactical combat. Every room was like a puzzle to be solved. I loved that.
The Ascent is a reincarnation of Crusader: No Remorse, almost like it was treated as a blueprint. It has the same isometric view, the same dodge mechanic behind obstacles to avoid damage, the same grittiness to the art direction. It is more action based than tactical, even though the tactical elements absolutely persists. It even has the same enemy types and the story is also centered around big nasty corporations.
I love it. It is the continuation from the first two Crusader games that we never got.
First of all the world building and the level design is phenomenal. I love how the world sprawls around you and everything is connected. Each area has a distinctive feel to it and you can pretty much figure out where you are by just looking around you. There are bars, companies, apartments, pubs, everywhere. Buildings full of details that you just run past because there’s no mission taking you inside. It helps building the depth to the world.
The combat is excellent. Even if it’s very action based, it’s also very tactical. You need to adapt to the environment you are in, to the enemies that you’re fighting and the situation that emerges. The game will adapt itself to you, so if you hide behind cover too much it will spawn enemies behind you. This could be irritating, but it helps keeping it interesting, for the whole 12 hour length of the game.
This game is hard. I played on easy and got my ass whopped over and over. If you don’t control the situation, you will die, and you need to try again with different tactics. Change your load out, armour and abilities. Adapt to gain the upper hand and you will prevail. If you just run in guns blazing chances are that you will be carried out on a stretcher.
The game knows that it’s hard, so it has no penalties for dying. It does something that I’ve not seen before. Instead of having a quicksave or autosave, it has spawn points on the map. When you die you do not loose anything. You just spawn at the nearest spawn point. If you managed to clear the encounter it will be gone and you can continue unchallenged to the next one. This makes you feel like you’re making progress even when you struggle and die a lot, because you will always get a little bit further, and then you reach the next spawn point. And boom! you gain a level, because you still keep all the XP accumulated from all your tries, making it just a little bit more manageable. This is very clever.
The characters are good and memorable. The dialogue is quite well written. I was not in the mood when I started playing this game, but soon found out that the homicidal AI that accompanies you is quite funny to listen to as it complements you on the blood and gore that you’re leaving after yourself. The story is weak and it took a while before I understood what they were going on about, but it had a somewhat satisfying ending. This is an area where the game could improve.
One thing that irritated me is that the font size is too small for being played on TV. I had to lift my ass from the sofa, go to the front of my TV in order to read some of the texts. It’s too bad that they haven’t tested it on consoles properly. The text size is TOO SMALL! I have a big ass TV and don’t sit that far away from it. Still much of the text was ineligible.
Another irritating thing is the loading times. Once you explore a larger part of the map you start taking the subway, taxi or elevator between the different parts. It goes much faster than running to the place where you’re going, but still 30-60 seconds loading screens are a bit too much. During some of the side missions it felt like I spent more time waiting for the game to load than playing the game.
Still this is the best time I’ve had with a game for some time. I love the callback to Crusader: No Remorse and I’ve actually kept on playing after the main story ended. I don’t feel like I’m done with this game quite yet and I might jump into the DLC in a short while.
I rate this game as EXCELLENT.
Replay 