Extraction shooters have always been a tough sell for me, with the slow methodical approach feeling like the opposite of what I usually want from a competitive multiplayer game. There’s an audience for that, sure, but the oddly-named Ascendant.com feels like it was built for people like me — anyone who wants a fast-paced, even chaotic, take on the extraction shooter. The game is being billed as the very first “adaption shooter,” and that’s an apt moniker given Ascendant’s penchant for throwing curveballs at players. With a few hours of playtime, Ascendant might be the first extraction shooter that gets me to stick around.
Calling something is an adaption shooter is all well and fine, but what exactly does that mean? In Ascendant, four teams of three players compete for a handful of resources called Biocores. There are three Biocores in to win in each match, and your team needs to take them back to your ship, and wait for a timer to countdown until they’ve been extracted.
The catch is that whenever a team grabs a biocore, every other team can instantly see its location. This means strategy is vital to every part of every match; do you rush ahead and try to be first, or hang back and lay an ambush for the team trying to escape? Picking up the biocore does give whoever’s holding it a powerful extra ability, but they now have a target on their backs.
This setup already creates some dynamic gameplay opportunities, but Ascendant makes things even more interesting by layering in some fascinating emergent gameplay elements.
Stumbling your way onto a command that lets you launch a massive airstrike that carpets a portion of the map in bombs for a solid minute. Using this can turn the tide in your favor, while having it used against you can send your team scrambling for cover, throwing off your entire strategy. Similarly, you might stumble upon a hulking armored vehicle called a Deathbringer, letting your team rumble across the map virtually unimpeded unless multiple teams gang up against you.
While these are player-activated, random emergent elements can also happen seemingly anywhere on the map. A massive turtle-like kaiju called a Burrower can blast out of the ground, accompanied by a team of smaller monsters. This means any firefights happening could suddenly turn into a desperate struggle to simply survive. There are other elements I saw pop up during my matches, like smaller monsters and lightning storms.
Apart from these big moments, Ascendant layers in smaller changes to make each match feel unique. There’s a shop where you can purchase shields and new weapons that change locations every round, basic vehicles can swap locations, and basic creatures can be harvested for a valuable resource called energy.
It’s this element of randomness that really makes Ascendant feel unique and provides a pulse-pounding take on extraction. With just a few matches each one felt drastically different, requiring my team to adopt completely different strategies. It’s hard to say if that adaption will remain dynamic when you’ve played dozens, or hundreds, of matches. But at least from an initial impression, Ascendant has the chops to back up its ambitions. The core shooting and controls feel rock-solid, and the adrenaline rush of trying to fight off other teams for that last biocore is nothing short of thrilling.
For a lot of shooters out there, your approach to longevity is memorizing each map, where every weapon drops, chokepoints, etc. Games like Call of Duty or Halo oftentimes nail this approach, which makes it effective for competitive play. That’s a perfectly valid design, but it also makes the “adaption” element of Ascendant feel delightfully refreshing and exciting in a way that genuinely feels new and fresh.
It’s clear Ascendant still needs some work. It’s a bit rough around the edges, with some visual bugs, unbalanced weapons, a few other glitches, etc. But in terms of the sheer ambition of the idea at the game’s core, it’s one of the most compelling shooters I’ve seen in quite a while. If you’re tired of the formulaic multiplayer games and the torrent of same-y hero shooters, Ascendant might just be worth a chance.
