Squeaking in one more for July. The Ascent was also announced at E3. Cyberpunk isometric looter action RPG. Looked amazing! Crazy density, great visuals, and of course it’s on Game Pass so there’s that kicker. It had a lot going for it.

It . . uh . . wasn’t good. I put a couple hours into it and it just feels like garbage.

Combat is bad. I had hoped it would be a twin stick shooter, left to move, right to aim and shoot. Uhhhno. It’s left to move, right to aim, left trigger to aim high, right trigger to actually shoot. And it just feels awful. Way too much going on.

Informationally there’s also just way too much crap going on. There’s mobs, barrels, creeps, greebles, SO MANY GREEBLES, doors, locked stuff you can’t open, crates, crates that explode when you roll over them, crates that you have to explicitly open, etc. Keeping track of what the hell is going on is horrible, way too easy to get flanked or surrounded.

Loot game is trash. There don’t appear to be random rolls on items, you get actual copies of guns, and it specifically calls out when you’re about to sell the last copy of a specific item, you know, if you want to maintain one of everything. It also does a terrible job at identifying when loot drops, so it lacks the dopamine hit from a new thing dropping, and even if that hit worked, it gets trashed because it’s probably just the seventh copy of the starting pistol. You see a sick purple out in the world? It might just be a skill point. You get like 5 of those when you level.

Stats and skills are garbage. Skills don’t do what you think they do, apart from the obvious ones like “hp go up”. Stats aren’t the things you’d expect, they’re things like “frame” that’s represented by a brick wall. What does it mean? I don’t know.

So, sadly, pass. If they improve that key shooting interface I might try it again, but for now, pass.