The Ascent
Skip · Multiplayer · 2021
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $29.99.
- Length
- 12h
- Value
- $2.50/hr
- Reviews
- 74% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 62% over the last 30 days against 74% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, GeForce GTX 660 ( 2048 MB) / Radeon R9 390X (8192 MB), 35 GB of storage. Windows only.
The Ascent is a solo and co-op Action-shooter RPG set in a cyberpunk world. The mega corporation that owns you and everyone, The Ascent Group, has just collapsed. Can you survive without it?
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $5.99, set in June 2024. 46 discounts in the 5 years on record. They run about 70 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 27 percent on value. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 62 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Crimsonland ($13.99, scores 77) beats it on value, while it beats Guardians of Orion (Phase 2) ($0.99, scores 0).
Players rate it 74 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 62 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 15 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2025 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 490 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 218 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 47 percent of the 1,773 reviews written there were positive, against 74 percent overall, and those are 9 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 12 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 26, 2.2 times as much.
The drop-off
91% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
211 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Might be worth it if this game were $5. Otherwise, story is crazy bland (it's a sci fi setting, whatever you are imagining is the story), weapons are lame and aren't difference makers, upgrades are shoulder-shrug worthy, good armor upgrades are few and far between. Ultimately, did the monkeys that made this game even play it looking for the fun value? I bought this game to see if their upcoming game would be worth...
First of all, the game looks beautiful. The Cyberpunk vibe is really nailed. The music is top notch and I really enjoyed the combat and gunplay. However, the game is not optimized. It will crash and it will freeze. It will also use almost 100% of your gpu (I'm running a 5070TI 16gb VRAM). Even with great specs this will happen. It ran better for the first 30-40% of the game then it suddenly throttled the...
Pretty great couch co-op gameplay here. Absolutely jaw-dropping visuals as detailed and ornate as any game I've ever seen. Some crashes and some repetition as you move back and forth on side quests (pro-tip: use a taxi). 28 hours for the first playthrough and we will probably do NG+ at some point. Not sure if I would've finished this solo but in the world of couch co-op this is really strong.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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The Ascent scores 37/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/979690/the-ascentThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.