Ascendant Preview
Here’s today’s question: with games like Fortnite and its brethren dominating the squad-shooter playing field, is there room for a scrappy newcomer? Developer PlayFusion hopes so, and offers Ascendant as proof. I had the chance to play a few matches with the team. Even a total newb like me had a great time and came away impressed and excited.
Ascendant starts strong with an intro/tutorial video that’s filled with snarky, retro-80s humor. It explains that, as the earth was becoming an inhospitable hellhole, you were put in cryosleep. Unfortunately, someone forgot to wake you up. Several hundred years later, you’re brought back to the land of the living. Only things still aren’t great, you know, living-wise. While the game’s humor is mostly found at the periphery of the action, I found it smart and genuinely amusing.
Three’s Company
It’s pretty easy to describe Ascendant’s core gameplay. It’s a 3v3v3v3 first-person shooter. The goal is to find three bio-cores and bring them back to your base. Imagine capture the flag times three. And the location of the flags change for each match.
Now, that sounds pretty basic, but the beauty and magic in Ascendant lie in the systems and mechanics surrounding the core. PlayFusion calls Ascendant the world’s first “Adaption” shooter, which is a fancy way of saying that map conditions are always changing. This means your team has to change tactics on the fly. The game director starts you in a random place on the map. The cores change location, too. I played two or three matches and they all felt unique.
Map design is very interesting, with lots of verticality, tons of hidden paths, and juicy sniping spots. You can, of course, collect weapons and gear from downed players. Scattered around the map are vending machines, where you buy upgrades and consumables. Currency comes from combat, killing monsters in the world and everyone on the team shares the wealth.
Filling out the gameplay are some familiar mechanics. There’s a social hub, drivable vehicles — some real, game-changing death bringers included — and lots of ways to manipulate and traverse the map. Ascendant plays variations on each. While there’s a ton of depth to get into eventually, the basics aren’t difficult to grasp at all.
Smooth Operator
For me, some of the team shooters and battle royale games become over-familiar very quickly. I’m not sure Ascendant will dodge this bullet, but it has enough systems at play to ward it off. Maps are constantly changing, base locations are always different, and the game invites and encourages lots of tactical approaches.
The game’s colorful, slightly stylized art and environments are appealing and the social hub is filled with things to do alone or with others, like 1v1 duels. Polish and optimization are already impressive, even though there’s no official release date. PlayFusion just announced an open beta weekend.
I don’t spend a lot of time playing squad shooters, but it’s a great time when I do. I’m going to encourage folks to keep their eyes on Ascendant. It’s on track to please a lot of fans of the genre, and I’m definitely there when it launches.
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