Ascendant Preview – How this 80s Adaption Shooter is evolving beyond extraction

thesixthaxis.com:

What if culture just stopped in the 1980s? In the wake of a civilisation-ending environmental cataclysm that forced humanity to quite literally freeze itself in time until the planet could (hopefully) recover, the world of Ascendant (formerly Ascendant Infinity) is stuck in the 80s, with all the big hair, lycra, and music very much intact. The difference is that, outside of protective shelter of a few Earthtrees, it’s now a hellscape out there with mutated monsters, and scarce resources that your tree’s inhabitants need to fight over using all the Biopunk tech they have to hand.

With Ascendant heading into an open beta weekend in early August, we’ve been hands on once again to check it out.

If we want to be brutally honest, the games industry is rarely about the next big thing. The battle royale genre is a case in point: after PUBG and Fortnite, the only real success story has been Apex Legends, despite probably hundreds of attempts. Of course, there does always need to be that spark, that game that popularises a new idea, and Ascendant has the potential to pull that off, even if it’s building off another established formula.

Strictly speaking, Ascendant is an extraction shooter, where you get in, fight to grab some loot and then try to get it back out to safely extract as other teams bear down on you and try to wrestle it away – the Biocore carrier emits a ping that pinpoints them on the map for others. It’s a format popularised by Escape from Tarkov, but Ascendant mixes it with the general feel of Apex Legends and throws a whole host of other ideas into the pot that should help it really stand out from the crowd.

PlayFusion is trying to brand this as the first Adaption Shooter, and you can absolutely see where they’re coming from in that regard. There is a single map in the game to start, but where a battle royale gives you the full map to start with before the storm rolls in, Ascendant takes this one map, locks and opens certain areas and avenues, throws in