Member-only story
If you like the idea of blasting enemies in a thickly detailed, smoke-covered cyberpunk city — it’s harder to do any better than The Ascent. I’d argue that it even achieves the vibe of movies like Bladerunner better (at times) than Cyberpunk 2077, no small feat considering this game comes from a much smaller team working with a significantly smaller budget.
The Ascent was one of the first games revealed for the Xbox Series consoles, and after about nine months of exclusivity, it came to PlayStation hardware earlier this year. The PS5 hardware offers a number of small things that the Xbox consoles just don’t have, like a faster SSD, unique haptic controller effects, and better 3D audio processing.
Does this port of an excellent little action game take advantage of that stuff? Well, yes and no.
On the plus side, The Ascent didn’t lose anything in the transition to Sony’s platforms. It’s still an awesome twin stick shooting game packed with a surprising amount of quality writing, tons of weapons to find, and many quests to complete. If you rush it, you’ll be finished with your first playthrough in around 10 hours, but you can more than double that if you take your time and do all the side stuff and really soak up the city environments.
On the minus side, PS5 exclusive perks are limited. As a fan of the DualSense…
