The Ascent

The Ascent's negative reviews are unusual in one specific way: almost all of them open by saying how good it is.

"Incredibly awesome environment design like I've never seen. Fun gunplay." "What a fantastic world, gameplay is great, environment, story, etc." "The atmosphere is absolutely stellar for an isometric action game." Those are the first lines of thumbs-down reviews with 420, 299 and 187 helpful votes. Every one of them then pivots to the same thing.

Veles

Credit where it's overwhelmingly due. Neon Giant were a studio of roughly a dozen people, and they built one of the best science-fiction environments in games — an arcology stacked in layers, from neon slums to corporate strata, so dense with background detail that walking is the point. Rain, crowds, signage, machinery, the sense of a city that continues above and below the fight you're currently in.

The combat holds its own. It's a twin-stick shooter with cover, and its cleverest touch is an aim-high/aim-low toggle that lets you shoot over cover or through crowds — a small mechanic that makes an isometric shooter feel three-dimensional. Add four-player co-op and a loot loop, and the design is genuinely strong.

The thing everyone pivots to

Bugs appear in 58 of the hundred most-helpful English negative reviews. Crashes appear in 44.

That would be ordinary for a launch window. What makes The Ascent different is the distribution: 17 negatives in 2021, 24 in 2022, 19 in 2023, 14 in 2024, 18 in 2025, 8 so far in 2026. Not a spike that resolved — a constant.

And the specifics are severe. A 420-vote reviewer reports "several main quests that can permanently break with no solution," reported repeatedly and never addressed. A 194-vote reviewer in January 2024, three years after launch: "still has the game-breaking bug where it crashes and deletes all your saves with no way to get them back. I enjoyed playing it, but I can't in good conscience recommend it while such a fundamental problem still exists."

Co-op is worse, at 31 combined mentions. A 224-vote review describes a single session producing "enough technical problems, bugs and lost saves that our entire player group rightfully chose to abandon the playthrough."

This is the second game I've reviewed where an unfixed save-destroying bug defines the reception — Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered has a similar multi-year complaint. The difference is that Spider-Man kept receiving patches.

The announcement record

I went looking for the patch history to check whether reviewers calling this "ABANDONED GAME" in capital letters were being fair.

The game's entire Steam announcement feed contains twelve items. Eleven are publisher sales — Curve Games spring sales, winter sales, a SHMUP fest, an Ocean Day promotion, a soundtrack bundle. The twelfth, posted on 29 July 2026, is a five-year anniversary note from Neon Giant citing 12 million players and looking ahead to what the studio does next.

There are no patch notes. That isn't proof no patching happened — studios don't always post — but when players have spent five years reporting save deletion and the public record contains only sale promotions, the "abandoned" characterisation is not unreasonable, and I'm not going to argue with it on the studio's behalf. The game has also changed publishers since launch, from Curve to KRAFTON, which rarely helps with legacy bug support.

Crashes are still being reported. Among the most recent negative reviews: "constant 2-second freeze ups and the occasional full crash to desktop (3 times in 20 minutes)" and "it crashed 2 times in my first 45 min."

What it's worth

Recent sentiment sits at 78 of the last 100 English reviews positive — slightly above the 75.6% lifetime — and the median playtime among critical reviewers is 14.4 hours, which is roughly the length of the campaign. People do finish it.

At NZ$12.48, a 75% discount off list, the calculation changes a great deal. Fifteen hours in a world this good for twelve dollars is a fair trade even with the risk attached, and that price is where this game has spent much of its life.

The verdict

The Ascent earns a 6.5. The art is a 9.5 and I'd defend that without hesitation — as a piece of world-building it is one of the most impressive things a small studio has produced this decade, and the shooting is genuinely good.

The score is what it is because a game that may delete your progress is a game with a hole in it, and because five years of consistent reporting have not produced a fix or, as far as the public record shows, an acknowledgement. That's a different failure from a game that launched rough and got better — most of the ones I've assessed today did exactly that.

Buy it cheap, play it solo, and copy your save folder somewhere safe before you start. The city is worth the visit; just don't leave anything valuable in it.