Ascendance

Genre: First-Person Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Ascendance is a First-Person Platformer where you are walking and jumping on stone structures suspended over an ocean. It features a clean look that gives it a certain Spartan appeal.

At first, this look is nice and unique, but it doesn’t take long for the flat colors to become boring and uninteresting. It doesn’t help that the game forces you to view this world with the four corners of your screen darkened, as if you’re viewing the game through a restrictive mask or something.

At the very least, if the platforming was good, this could have been a solid game, but here the game disappoints as well. The platforming basically consists of “go to this light pillar… now look for another light pillar and go to that… wash, rinse, repeat”. There’s very little exploration, save for trying to find the best way to get from one point to the next. However, when you’re asked to go from point A to point B to another point that’s not far from point A, it starts to feel like you’re just being given busywork.

However, even that is not the worst flaw in this game. No, the worst problem with Ascendance is that it has some of the worst input lag I’ve ever experienced in a platformer. I can press the button and actually wait a moment for the jump to register in the game, it’s so bad. I actually found myself pressing the jump button early in my runs up to ledges to ensure that I didn’t keep plummeting to my doom time and again.

The frustrating thing is, this game had some potential to it – I like the idea of exploring a growing surreal landscape in a lonely remote area, with it growing as I explore it further. That’s a cool idea, and I could see that making for both good exploration and good platforming potential. Unfortunately, Ascendance fails at all of this, and the result is a game that just isn’t fun to play.

tl;dr – Ascendance is a First-Person Platformer where you’re running and jumping on stone structures in the middle of the ocean. Unfortunately, the graphics are lacking, the gameplay is tedious, and the game’s controls have some of the worst input lag of any Platformer I’ve ever played. Skip this one.

Grade: D+

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