Ascendant Review

Fans of roguelike games obviously thrive on pressure. By their very definition, if you die in one, you don’t just lose level progress - you lose everything. Items, weapons, buffs and stat increases all disappear when you perish in the world of roguelike dungeon crawling. It’s a mechanic that has gained enormous popularity with games like The Binding of Isaac and even the Diablo series pays homage to the genre with hardcore modes that punish your death by deleting any and all character progress.

With such a harsh penalty, you’d think that gamers would dismiss the constant threat of being reset back to square one as something not worth the effort but If games like the Souls series have taught us anything, it’s that a lot of people like pressure, difficulty and a real sense of threat.

Hapa Games’ Ascendant clearly follows this ethos, as the game is damn hard - and at times, unfairly so. All the usual roguelike elements are present in Ascendant. Randomly generated levels split up into segmented rooms? Check. Item rooms that buff your character? Check. A deceptively deep - for a roguelike - combat system that you need to learn in order to survive? Okay, that last one doesn’t sound roguelike at all, but it’s here, and it’s what sets Ascendant apart from others in the genre. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work.

Regardless of what character you pick on your first attempt at beating Ascendant, you’ll have to learn the ropes of how to combo enemies in order to survive. Instead of just dodging and then bashing or shooting everything in the face, Ascendant wants you to take note of enemy placement and prioritise what to attack first. After a certain amount of pain has been dealt to an enemy, they’ll gain a golden outline that signals that they’re staggered. When they’re in this state, you’re able to trigger your launch action i.e. hit them in any direction and watch them fly into the nearest solid wall or enemy.

This is how you survive the onslaught of weird 2.5D aliens that will assail you every time you move on to another area and it’s a fun way to battle until you reach the later stages and boss fights. Some of these end-of-stage fights are great - one tasks you with launching enemies into a rickety tower where the boss resides until it topples and brings the smug bastard down to ground level - but as you progress, you’ll find yourself getting frustrated at how poorly explained some enemy mechanics are. The first time I managed to claw my way into the fourth stage, I was instantly attacked by cool-looking cel-shaded sprites that could teleport, ending in near instant death.

Difficulty isn’t a problem, but when it arises from cheap tactics employed by your foes without any warning, trying to reach the same point again starts to grate, more so because enemy variety feels rather stilted. Passive buffs that you can either buy or find will help you to survive, but the random nature of whether you’ll find something useful doesn’t help to negate the frustrating nature of later enemies. This extends to boss monsters too. One of them - a giant, burrowing, eel-like creature - offers no visual or audio cues as to how to damage it, and the one time I was able to beat it felt like complete chance.

To help spur you on after each death is permanent progress in the form of item collections. Each time you get your grubby mitts on something new, the game’s database will update itself with a description of what the trinket will do. Unlockable characters with varying types of perks are also attainable, so it’s up to you if Ascendant’s little niggles are worth ignoring in the name of completion.

Ascendant is certainly enjoyable, but in relation to other games already available in the genre, there just isn’t enough variety to encourage replayability, and you may find yourself getting tired rather quickly of dying in annoying and unfair ways.