Ascent: The Space Game Review

Space; no longer the final frontier where gaming is concerned. Space themed games are everywhere these days, in every form you can imagine, even MMO’s. So if you’re going to be producing a space game you’d better have something unique or fun to offer the gaming community, else you’ll find yourself floating aimlessly in the cold dark void.

Fluffy Kitten Studios’ aptly named Ascent: The Space Game is indeed a space game, an MMO space game to be exact, where humanity is on the raggedy edge, close to extinction, and you must help to rebuild civilisation!

After you choose your captain name you can start your mission of repopulating the human race (not through sexy time. Minds out of the gutter!) by taking the tutorial. This consists of showing the controls to move and how to shoot, nothing else because that’s pretty much all this game is about. The game being so simple you’d hope they’d get what they do include down tight. You’d hope!

The game starts off rough. What Ascent does well aesthetically is space. Fluffy Kitten Studios has space down, and it looks pretty good, but it’s not so adept at creating such things as water or grass, you know, the basic things one needs if creating planets with water and grass. Starting out on a planet that Flight Simulator 98 would be embarrassed to be sporting does not give the player a good impression. Why they couldn’t start you in a much prettier space environment I do not know, but they totally should have!

But don’t worry, your attention will very quickly be taken away from the flawed graphics to the completely lacking controls. If you’re creating a game where you are expected to pilot any form of craft for large period of time you need to make sure the controls are fun, responsive and functional, Ascent’s controls do not take this into account. To go forward you press space (shift and space for ‘auto-run’), to fly up press W, down, S, left A, right D, roll left Q, roll right E. All very usual, and if this was merely a game where you fly from one point to another the controls could be serviceable, but they also want you to aim with these controls. This is needlessly annoying and frustrating, especially when we already have a perfectly usable control system for playing. What the game needs is these tried and tested controls for this type of game: The mouse moves the cursor which is also where your ship points. WASD for move moment. Nice, easy, responsive, fun. In future updates I’d highly recommend they add this relatively simple control system.

If the control system is something that you dislike about this game, don’t worry; you won't be using them much. The general gameplay of Ascent has the player clicking destinations on the autopilot console, buying items from a space station, then clicking on other destinations, depositing the items then clicking on another destination, rinse and repeat. All the movement is handled by ingame animations. No piloting needed. The space stations look cool though. So that’s something.

In most MMO’s (and games in general) you have obstacles in your way to getting to your goals, these are usually in the form of enemies. Ascent has nothing like this, the only obstacle getting in your way is your individual ability to read. However the game will make it very clear for you as to what you need to do and where you need to go. There are sections of play where you do have to use the controls to mine asteroids, and maybe this is why there is so little refinement or thought put into the controls, and maybe the annoyance of trying to line up to shoot the mines with the mining laser is their way of putting some form of difficulty in the game, either way this doesn’t make the controls anymore fun. But this leaves the general gameplay being nothing more then selecting options and watching some simple animations. Pretty boring.

While gameplay isn’t Ascent’s main focus, what they really want you to focus on is rebuilding humanity. You do this by obtaining resources through buying or mining asteroids and then going to a planet and using those resources to build things. These buildings then produce storage space and more resources that you can then use to build more buildings on other planets or a space station. These again just allow you to build more stuff. There isn’t any real variety in the buildings, just how much they can store or what resources they produce. The playability of this game depends how much enjoyment you get out of building stuff for the sake of building more stuff and feeling like a space hero.

If you want combat and some level of difficulty beyond the controls I highly suggest looking up the many other space games currently out on Steam and other platforms. On the plus side Ascent does have some decent voice acting, a nice soundtrack and runs pretty smoothly.