So at one point I quit Unicorn Overlord, and later started a new character on expert again, got part way through Drakenhold and just got bored of it again, despite all the praise it's not that great of a game. Well, I picked it up again the past few weeks and got just before I initially quit the game, got bored, and quit again. Unicorn Overbore amirite?

So the past week after putting Unicorn Overlord again, I've decided to pick back up and play The Ascent again, give it another chance after completing one mission after the tutorial with a friend, this time solo. And visually this game has an amazing looking cyberpunk aesthetic. Unfortunately it's not very good. I mean at first, it's like, okay, this is alright. You have two weapons that you can swap between, you've got a weapon that will charge up and you can use that to stun enemies or as depending on the attachment an explosion in a big radius, but this you can use very infrequently. Honestly you'll likely use this once and then a long long period of time will pass before you can use it again, and then you have an ability that you can use provided you have enough points for it, but it never seems useful to even need to use and I haven't bought another one.

The weapon swapping is honestly not necessary, because you often can't hit anything off screen(it's got a birds eye view world,) so either the shotgun that I have I shoot the enemies point blank or I take several shots with the weapon I had since the beginning of the game, just upgraded several times which btw, I only have the option to buy a few other weapons and I've had the option to buy these few other weapons since the start of the game.

The enemies that I've been fighting are identical to the enemies I've been fighting. You might have a slight change in the weapons they use but it's either a homing rocket, a grenade, a melee weapon, some form of ranged weapon be it pistol, machine gun, or shotgun which always fires one shot or burst then stops for a period of time. 10 hours later... same sh--.

And then, you're going to the games objective, and the game does such a bad job at providing where you need to go with its semi open world environment, that you pass the objective point by a few feet and then at full HP you get OHKOd, then you're like, oh, I should have went down that hallway or in that area right there. Everything about this game is just so badly designed outside of the beautiful looking world. Hard to actually get around because it's a bird's eye view game that is so dense with multiple layers, extremely repetitive from the start of the game, extremely unbalanced with an absolute shit tracking system, a large number of tutorials and the game half asses on telling you important shit like what the attributes actually mean(despite having a tutorial for it,) you can't see the weapon upgrade path without just doing them so you need to just upgrade the weapon multiple times and then restart the game in order to know what future levels do(only to realize that yeah, the very first weapon is still the best weapon in the game.)

This list of complaints and sometimes nitpicks could go on, but this visually stunning looking game is a whole lot of sh--. Oh, one more thing. The game has hard crashed on me around 10 times. Now most of the time it's when I've died, and if I get OHKO'd the game hard crashes. Like the game can't comprehend dealing more damage than I have HP so it just hard crashes.

So this time I'm done with The Ascent again and it's received all the chances of me ever picking it back up again that it ever will. The Ascent looks beautiful, and it's not a bad game, but it's not a good game. I'd say it's about a 4/10 with all the complaints I have with it which is just mediocre. I don't need to play 20 more hours of this slog to know my opinion of it won't change, infact, forcing myself to play beyond the 10 hours that I have will likely have me unfairly rate it even worse seeing as how I don't like the game as it is. Unlike what most people state, the game doesn't get good after 16 hours(referencing Final Fantasy 16,) infact, you can generally pick everything up about a game within the first five hours of gameplay, and then beyond that it's just story, which most video game storylines such.. so there's that, is The Ascent story good? No, it's not. It's acceptable for what it is, enough to keep you listening to what's being said if you can suffer through the rest of the game.