![]() ![]() You'll spot showers of sparks from droids fixing the flanks of walkways, and balconies stuffed with party-goers, just above the navigable plane. Some of these depths can be accessed by elevator or floating platform - transitions reminiscent of Abe's Oddysee's fore-to-background shifts - but enormous effort has been spent bringing life to places that can't be reached. ![]() Chance gaps and reinforced glass floors offer giddy views of hovercars slicing through disorderly canyons of tenements and factories, hundreds of metres beneath. But the game ably cultivates the impression of colossal depth. The vertical city premise is a bit sleight-of-hand: the world is functionally a series of flat planes linked by loading transitions, one that doesn't even see the need for a jump button. There's a base level of visual fascination to the way floor patterns and buildings map to, or tug against the axes of shooting and exploration suggested by the quasi-isometric viewpoint. The elevated diagonal perspective does a lot of work here, producing a landscape of corners that split the setting into lush, contrasting arrangements of colours and textures. The Ascent's city is catnip for digital flâneurs. It's easy to get lost, even when following the breadcrumb trail laid out by the HUD, and I don't mind one bit. The arcology's hub districts are a battle royale of adboards and Hangul script, a chaos of screens and reflections filtered through smog, the interweaving paths of delivery drones and the shuffling bodies of hundreds of weary NPCs. And how about that lighting? Polluted, gauzy, shifting, overwhelming. Each store is a delicate little treasure box, the lid peeling away when you step inside - neatly patterned with wares, like chips filling a circuit board. Open air markets of steam, textile and clanking metal. Fortified holes-in-the-wall staffed by philosophical robots. Soylent-green pharmacies and 24 hour kiosks with the fading aura of an impending hangover. Seriously, you never saw such shops! Armouries fringed by spinning, wireframe weapons. It's probably the lockdown talking, but I want to live in them. Availability: Out now on PC and Xbox One/Series S/X on Game Pass.But what The Ascent's world lacks in imagination and bite it almost makes up for in scale and an exhaustive, toymaker's commitment to the fine details. This is not one of your transgressive, norm-busting punk fictions - even Ruiner, its closest cousin, is a bolt from the blue by comparison. Admittedly, it also teems with cliches and callouts to the usual canonical works: William Gibson's phrase "high tech, low life", which flickers on displays throughout like a sorcerer's incantation Blade Runner's flourescent umbrella handles and melancholy synth score pirouetting holostrippers from any number of seedy sci-fi saloons an Oriental faction who worship honour and wield katanas. Its tiered alien megacity is one of the liveliest cyberpunk settings I've explored, always crawling with people and machines, whether you're massacring mutants in the sewers or gazing out from a boardroom window. The Ascent's arcology setting is splendid, if heavily derivative - shame that all you can do here is gun and grind. ![]()
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