Day: September 29, 2021

I’ve been having a tough time, lately. I live in a big city in the United States, and I’m struggling to find work that isn’t going to make me spiritually miserable or exhaust me completely. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a second turn for the worse in my country, and a lot of hope I had back in May is mostly gone. I’m not suffering nearly as badly as many of my countrymen are, but I’m also feeling like I don’t have much of a future – every day, there’s new stories about corporations gobbling up resources and space side by side with stories of hundreds of thousands of regular people on the brink of losing their homes. I, and many of my friends, feel pretty powerless to make any change for the better.

The Ascent (Neon Giant, 2021) feels like a strikingly timely game, which surprised me. I expected it to be a solid but one-note sci-fi action RPG, with a story about some regular guy who becomes powerful beyond his wildest dreams and saves his society from total collapse – if this sounds cynical, it’s because my recent experiences with sci-fi stories in games have been subpar. What I found instead was an elegant narrative that struck chords the way sci-fi and cyberpunk media ought to: the author trying to communicate an allegory alongside the plot, but through immersion – wrapping you up in the details, until you encounter something that isn’t identical to your experience, but mirrors it through a series of scratched, neon lenses. You connect to the characters not because they do the same things you do, but because they feel the same way for similar reasons.

Your character in The Ascent is a glorified handyman with a gun, indentured into servitude to the Ascent Group in exchange for the travel fare it took to get to this planet. The Ascent Group itself couldn’t care less if you lived or died, but stackBoss Poone, your direct supervisor, is a little more involved. Your job is whatever he decides it is, whether that’s going down into the bowels of the Arcology to do repairs to to clean out Feral nests.

And then, the Ascent Group shuts down. Not the arcology itself, exactly, but the board of directors running the show. Suddenly they’re gone, and they’ve defaulted on all their finances. Their systems doing larger scale maintenance and operation are going offline. It’s every indent for themself. If you don’t move fast, competing corporations are going to descend on your arcology and strip it for parts, leaving the massive machine you live in totally non-functional.

You solve these problems with guns, of course, because it’s an action game. The core mechanic that sets The Ascent apart is its height system, which creates a genuine tension. At “rest” you stand straight up and shoot at waist height. You can raise your gun to shoot at a higher height, which does increased stagger damage. You can also crouch to hide behind cover, or walk around like a very dangerous duck out in the open if you really want. While you’re crouching, you can raise your gun to shoot at “waist height” over your cover, avoiding all shots that would hit you. Playing evasively behind cover is a big part of the game, and as enemies spawn in and swarm you’ll need to constantly re-evaluate your position. The shot-height mechanic was surprisingly robust, and I enjoyed getting to see it put to the test right out of the gate – the first enemies you encounter, ferals, are low to the ground. If you raise your gun to try to invoke more stagger damage, you’ll simply shoot right over them. This dance of crouching, hiding behind cover, dashing out, and then crouching in the middle of the open space to try get the right shot becomes part of the rhythm of the game later on, as other alien species of different heights join the ranks of the gangs you’re fighting.

There are a variety of classes of guns, which obviously perform differently but actually feel different to play too. You can equip a tactical item which charges up as you do damage, and while these are diverse and also feel different to use, the kinds of tac’s you’ll end up carrying into later stages of the game narrow significantly. Once you find the tactical that spawns an entire mech for you to pilot, I doubt you’ll ever go back.

You also can equip two augmentations and two modules, the former of which are active while the latter are passive. The augmentations feel great and very diverse, but unfortunately as a solo player my sole focus was survivability and immediate damage output. I imagine that in multiplayer, there’s more room to explore more niche character builds because your teammates can watch your back. Really, though, I was excited every time an augmentation came off cooldown and I got to use it. They’re powerful without being the basis for your whole playstyle, and the visual effects that accompany them are fantastic. They just feel great.

While the combat mechanics themselves feel good, The Ascent does commit three combat design cardinal sins. 1. Enemies spawn from behind you from areas you’ve already cleared, which breaks the immersion pretty badly. This is acceptable in the areas where enemies spawn by climbing in from over the sidewalk railings, but in dungeons it feels terrible. 2. Damage numbers are inconsistently displayed, which is important because the color of those numbers tells you whether the damage type you’re using is effective or not. 3. Enemies just don’t stop coming in certain areas. This would be okay if you started a big fight and every enemy nearby off the screen came towards you, but new enemies will spawn in for this big encounter – and then you’ll move further through the zone and yet more enemies are waiting nearby and spawn fresh. This kind of encounter pacing feels okay in the neighborhoods, but it’s an absolute slog during some of the closed-space missions.

The world of The Ascent is deeply horrifying, but generally in the same ways that capitalism, militarism, and socio-economic exploitation are horrifying in our own world. The writers behind The Ascent know just the right dials to turn to take regular exploitation and make it even more gruesome – one of my favorite side missions involved tracking down the corpse of an alien’s friend, which had gotten lost in the morgue system. Over the course of the plotline, you discover that the soda this alien’s friend was obsessed with actually contained slime from an alien creature which, when incubated in a warm being, could bioaccumulate rare metals. This missing corpse was harvested for her metals after death, and wiped from all records. Most of the other side missions I played were like this – surprisingly personal little stories of grief, anger, and deception inside this huge arcology these people all called home. Mechanically, too, the side missions I completed all felt like they were worth doing – interesting weapons and augments are given as rewards.

The main reason The Ascent’s setting can successfully be so creepy and genuine is because the world feels truly alive. A large part of this is thanks to The Ascent’s incredible graphics and stunning attention to detail. No two neighborhoods feel the same, yet are never too different so as to feel like they can’t be part of the same citystate – and even more granular, no two streets feel quite the same either. The immense amount of work that went into placing trash, streetlights, weird little NPC conversations, open buildings, cables, and machinery pays off tenfold by making the arcology feel like a real place. My favorite trick Neon Giant uses is all the animation and action happening in the background, under and away from the surface you’re walking on. Ships fly by, lights blink, maintenance robots go about their job – the arcology’s infinite number of systems are all playing out around you, ignoring you completely – just like life.

Neon Giant’s approach to the distant future is to lean all the way in, to really explore and display the full possibilities of what life might look like – this, too, makes the world feel somehow more alive than a nearer version of the future more closely tied to what we know. There are multiple other species of aliens all living in concert in the arcology, and I applaud Neon Giant for making them look more radically different than “vaguely human-shaped.” I’m especially a fan of the Keesh, these bipedal eel people who have had to reshape a lot of their traditional behaviors and society to fit in with other sentient beings.

One part of the arcology’s design that feels true to life and is miserable to play through is the way fast-travel works. Quite a few main story missions require you to travel to far-apart places in the arcology, including across tiers of the structure. The fast-travel train system will move you a significant distance, but you’re still going to have to do quite a bit of running around to get between tier elevators, which is a big drag on pacing. The taxi system is a joke: you can pay 1,000 uCreds to be picked up anywhere, just to be dumped somewhere in the middle of your selected neighborhood – you can’t pick your actual destination.

Bodymodding is a big part of society – and of gameplay, through the augments. You can change your sex for free and whenever, if you want, at the same place you get razor drones and energy shields inserted under your skin. And, again, Neon Giant isn’t afraid to make the far future scary and upsetting – corporations have figured out how to freeze people, but making spaceships go fast is difficult and expensive. If you want to get to a new planet, you’re going to need to sign away some years of your life to pay for the journey. If the ship you’re on miscalculates its trajectory, you might not get to your destination for decades – an NPC in the spaceport has been waiting for her brother for years, with no confirmation of where his ship is or when he’s going to show up. This repeated, subtle theme about the artificially long lives people live, contrasted against how dangerous and miserable it is to get turned into living trash in the arcologies really stuck out to me.

The voice acting for stackBoss Poone, nogHead, and Kira was excellent. Actually funny jokes, simple but solid characterization for those three main NPCs, and unique alien designs make the main cast really stand out as great characters in a genre that doesn’t often get such tender writing attention. The cinematic cutscenes during major plot moments are well-animated and well-paced – none overstayed their welcome, and were all skippable if you had, say, just died and needed to get through a scene again.

Ultimately, I liked how low-profile the plot of the game was. Obviously you run around starting big gun-fights and getting involved in megacorp politics, and the final boss fight does bridge into cosmic horror, but you start as some guy with a long and terrible contract, and you end as some guy who happened to have an absolute nightmare of a day who is now technically a “free agent”. You might have access to the upper level of the arcology where the sun actually hits you, but you can’t live there. There’s no way you can afford it. You’re a handyman.

The Ascent is a high-quality entry in the canon of ARPGs, and I hope attention stays on it long enough for it to make a mark. Unfortunately, the game was quite buggy and had some very rough performance issues at launch, and while many of these have been fixed with a patch on August 6, many stutters and bugs remain. However, Neon Giant seems dedicated to their effort, and I trust these will be ironed out in the next few weeks. 8.5/10

GameRev was provided with a key for the purposes of this review. KudzuControl played The Ascent on PC, using a mouse and keyboard.

According to a popular leaker, we may be getting a reveal for the next Call of Duty game sooner than expected.

The next entry in the Call of Duty series is yet to be officially revealed, but reputable leaker Tom Henderson claims that the reveal date is near. According to Henderson, the next Call of Duty, codenamed Vanguard, will be revealed on Thursday, August 19. Apparently, these details have been verified with four different sources. Henderson’s tweet about Call of Duty 2021 has since been removed via DMCA by the copyright holder.

This date coincides with the rumored PlayStation’s State of Play event which would be a great opportunity to give players a sneak peak of the game. Call of Duty Vanguard is said to take place during World War 2, following the trend that the Battlefield series has set.

New Warzone map may be on the way.

Previous rumors suggest that Vanguard will feature Warzone integration with the possibility of a completely new battle royale map also being considered. This map is said to fit the World War 2 aesthetic to match the game’s setting.

For now, there isn’t much evidence to back up these claims so it is best to take this information with a grain of salt until more information comes to light. Thankfully id the reveal indeed is taking place on August 19, then we only have to wait one week until we learn more about Vanguard.

RiMS Racing replicates the experience of racing on a motorcycle. Together with the game’s tough bike riding mechanics and bike customization, RiMS Racing aims at providing a very realistic and fluid gameplay for players to indulge in. Whether you are an inexperienced player or a hardcore biker, there are settings that can assist the laid back gamers who want to play for fun. Turning off the settings that assist the driver creates a more challenging and unique way of playing for those who are more experienced with how bikes function. These settings can be tweaked to fit the player’s needs and playstyle.

First and foremost it is very important to shed light on the bike customization RiMS Racing has to offer. The game did a magnificent job when it comes to this aspect. Motorbike enthusiasts can spend up to hours upgrading and unlocking new bikes through by playing the main story line. There are only 8 bikes, but the room for customization allows the player to create and tune their bikes in several ways that allow the bike to function and drive differently.

The career mode is where most players will earn the necessary credit used to upgrade and buy bikes. The career missions range on a wide scale of different missions and challenge to avoid repetitiveness within the the game. This endorses the player to collect and spoil himself or herself with upgrade goodies.

RiMS Racing does not excel when it comes to gameplay; however, credit should be given for the effort and hard work that was put into the game. It is not all that bad, but if more effort was put into refining some render issues and enhancing the game’s graphics such as the generic weather effects and monotonic visuals would be a plus. Reworking such details will enable the game to compete with other motorbike games in the market which surpass RiMS Racing in that aspect.

Overall, RiMS Racing is a spectacular bike racing game despite some minor problems. The game does a fantastic job to fill in time and enjoy some casual bike riding gaming sessions; however, bike enthusiasts might view the problems as limitations to fully experience a hands on bike racing simulation game. RiMS Racing peaks with its customization system which allows one to customize their bikes at a very micro level. For example, if we were to customize the brakes, one can change the calibers, disks, pads, fluids, cables, and much more.

It would be nice to see additional content and updates that keep refining the mechanics, enhance the already amazing bike customization system, and add additional bikes and game modes.

GameRev was provided with a digital download code for the purpose of this review.

After months of waiting, NBA 2K22 is here and it has left its predecessors in the dust. This year’s iteration has established itself as the greatest basketball simulation game thanks to its superior realistic gameplay and renewed focus on rewarding smarter playstyles.

The gameplay in NBA 2K takes it to the next level by keeping things simple and improving on the foundations of previous games. As with every iteration in the franchise, small tweaks and reworks to dribbling and shooting make the gameplay experience much more satisfying. Dribble moves and combinations feel more precise and snappier giving you more control of the players. The new shot meter is also a welcome change from last year’s version. As you go for a shot, the meter will be directly affected by your player’s shooting abilities, energy level and defensive coverage. The new meter also takes the form of a longer arc that makes it much clearer when to release your shot.

In previous years, defending against certain players felt like an impossible task as they could just blow past you and finish at the rim with ease. Now, Visual Concepts have overhauled defense to reward skilled defenders both on the perimeter and in the paint. This also forces the offense to run more complex plays instead of relying on getting easy buckets. On the other hand, this has made the defensive AI slightly too pushy, as I was often faced with annoying full-court press defense during games.

A career in basketball, among other things.

In MyCareer, you’ll get to create your own player and gradually evolve him to become a Hall-of-Famer if you’re good enough. In typical 2K fashion, you’ll experience your character’s journey, starting off in college as he makes his way to the NBA. While not unfamiliar at this point, the story still has some interesting twists and forces you to take tough decisions which could affect your career going forwards.

Naturally, the path to success is difficult and you’ll have to grind to unlock Badges and earn VC to upgrade your player’s abilities. This aspect of the game remains the most engaging yet most time consuming, especially if you want to max out your character’s stats. While this isn’t a major issue playing MyCareer alone, you’ll quickly feel outclassed in the Rec Room by those who purchased microtransactions. Unfortunately, it seems the only way to speed up your progress is by purchasing VC with real money, which has become a trend in previous NBA 2K games. Apart from basketball, you can do just about anything like shopping, skateboarding, making hip-hop music which are fun distractions at times. Nonetheless, I would have preferred the mode to focus more on basketball above all else.

Card collecting at its finest.

Thankfully, some of MyCareer’s issues are alleviated in the MyTeam mode which lets you build your own team of past and present NBA superstars. The mode is fully-packed with content and ways to drastically improve your squad for free in a reasonable amount of time. The auction house is also a great way to get specific players you want without having to spend VC. In addition, NBA 2K22 has introduced a Card Grading system and Shoe Builder to this mode. While these ideas make sense, they don’t have much of an impact on the game and I opted to ignore them.

The Draft is also a new feature that lets you assemble a roster of players and get rewarded based on the number of games you win (similar to FIFA Ultimate Team’s Draft mode). This is by far one of the most fun aspects of the game but does require an entrance fee which is paid in real money after your first few draft runs. Hopefully, we’ll get to try out this mode using in-game currency in the near future. Lastly, MyNBA has received some additions in terms of coaching staff badges and attributes. While these are nice to have, this franchise mode doesn’t feel much more interesting than it did a few years ago.

All this being said, NBA 2K22 provides the most realistic and fluid basketball sim experience to date. The gameplay remains rock-solid and the variety of game modes available means there is always things to do. Although, microtransactions are still an issue, NBA 2K22 does justify the upgrade from last year’s iteration thanks to some much needed changes to the core gameplay, especially on defense. While, the last few entries in the franchise have been hit or miss, NBA 2K22 does deserve recognition for breaking the cycle and exceeding expectations with this release.

GameRev was provided with a digital download code for the purpose of this review.

Astria Ascending is a JRPG by Artisan Studios, featuring a team of developers who worked on Final Fantasy, Nier Automata and Bravely Default. The game was also developed in partnership with Hitoshi Sakimoto, composer of Final Fantasy XII and Vagrant Story, and Kazushige Nojima, known for his writing for Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy VII Remake. The story revolves around the world of Orcanon wherein you command a battalion of eight demi-gods who are tasked to protect Harmony from the Noises. You are granted powers once chosen as a demi-god, but are also subjected to a shortened lifespan of three years. After the three years have passed, another eight champions are appointed, beginning the cycle once again. The premise definitely held promise, but was a tad disappointing in its execution.

The game already stumbles at the very beginning, introducing you to the cast of characters at the tail end of their reign as demi-gods. You learn from the onset that they only have three months left to live. With this as your starting point, you don’t get the proper time to get invested in each character. There are moments in the game wherein you get a glimpse of each character’s backstories, but these moments are few and far in between, and never quite hit the mark. Even the relationships between the demi-gods felt a little strained, being more like a motley crew of so-called heroes forced to work with each other. Dialogue between characters fell flat, often resulting in them mocking each other like Arpajo and Eko. All in all, the game lacked exposition and I felt very detached and disinterested in the narrative partly because I couldn’t grow attached to these so-called heroes, and partly because of the haphazardly-done world building.

Where I will give the game much credit is in its art, there’s no question about it. Astria Ascending shines in its visually stunning 2D world. What drew me into the game from the trailer alone were the fully hand-drawn illustrations and beautiful landscapes, reminiscent of a Vanillaware game. There were moments while playing where I would simply pause and just admire the lush environments and the details of the artwork. In a way, I almost felt like a tourist within the game because of all the times I would catch myself merely sightseeing. It felt like being inside of a painting.

It’s a shame that its visual design is its most distinctive feature, because at the end of the day “pretty” can only get you so far. Just a few hours in and I already felt like the experience was a bit of a slog. While it is indeed similar in format to most JRPGs, the way the game progressed was borderline repetitive. A distress call would come from one of the districts, the cast of heroes would rush in to investigate, a backstory would ensue, the demi-gods would battle through Noises, and you’d wind up back at the Council Room in Harmonia. There wasn’t much you could do in between because quests had little payoff, the J-Ster mini game wasn’t really vital to your progress, and going on hunts was tiresome because of the lack of quest markers and badly designed map.

Combat, while not perfect, uses a turn-based format that would please most old school JRPG fans. It is what you’d expect from a game of this genre and is charming in its own regard, with a battle mechanic called “Focus” reminiscent of Bravely Default’s “Brave” and “Default” system. The difficulty seemed balanced enough and would trick you at times, making it feel like a cakewalk until a boss started to evolve into multiple forms. It challenged you to find the right weak spots, pick the optimal party, and be as resourceful as you could. The biggest flaw in its combat system however, is the lack of a turn indicator, making it difficult to plan your actions wisely. In addition to that, while immediately starting out with eight characters may seem like a good thing, it made me bench certain characters outright because it felt tedious to build the entire team.

Something else that Astria Ascending could have done without was the layer of complexity that came with the job system and ascension tree. The ascension tree in itself, similar to Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid, wasn’t a bad way to go about character progression. It was the fact that you needed stat orbs for certain parts of it, and the game showed you no clear way of attaining these stat orbs. From what I could tell, it seemed like it was a special drop from some enemy encounters. The job system also felt abruptly introduced, giving you a choice between three main jobs for each character with only a short one-liner to explain what the job entailed. You couldn’t even see the skill tree associated with the job. It felt like I was going in blind. You are only awarded two job orbs when the system is first introduced, and much like the stat orbs, there’s no way of telling when you’ll get your next orbs to unlock another job. Based on these instances, the game seemed to throw in many mechanics without much rationale, drawing inspiration from Final Fantasy and Bravely Default, yet making things unnecessarily complicated in the process.

Some quality of life improvements to Astria Ascending are definitely welcome. While they may not entirely fix what the game lacks, they would help make a more enjoyable experience. For one, being able to speed up battle animations or skip through dialogue during cutscenes would make the game feel a lot less sluggish. Adding quest markers or improving the map layout would also encourage players to explore the 2D world and make it easier to engage in more side quests along the way. Even making more sense of the weather system would be a nice touch, because as it stands, it seems like it was just added in as an afterthought.

Astria Ascending tries its best to be a jack-of-all-trades, yet fails in doing so. You can clearly see where the game drew inspiration from, but it would’ve benefitted from some editing down to focus on its better mechanics. While the game leaves much to be desired in certain aspects, it still does have its charm. In other words, it’s not bad, but it’s not great either. At the very least, the game is friendly for all types of players, with different settings to help you calibrate the difficulty at which you’d like to play. If you’re new to the genre or are a casual JRPG player, then Astria Ascending may be worth trying.

GameRev was provided with a digital download of the game for the purpose of this review.