The Ascent

I'm interested.

Oblig:

"CyBERpunkkk"!

This game is out now, it is pretty fun, at the moment of commenting, not a great deal of replayability  

I feel sorry for anyone who goes into this expecting an arcade co-op shooter, or a diablo-like game.

This is the most definitively Hazy game I've ever played. There's not a single aspect that's particularly good or outright bad. I'd have to individually point at every single aspect and break it down to try and find out where it sort of lost me but not completely.

The quests: There's a fair few of them, and some have fun dialogue, but beyond the unique rewards they give there's no real consequences, you never really feel like you're having any effect on the world. A few are just fetch quests.

The art: It's so nice, it's so nice, guys. It's impossible to communicate how nice it is.

The exploration: The landscapes are amazing, but with respawning enemies, no sprint and inconvenient fast-travel points it starts to feel like a boring commute. And I wouldn't advise skipping side quests/side exploration (opening every map-marked chest), as it seems you'll be easily underlevelled and undergeared for the main campaign, which is a very bad idea.

The combat: The cover mechanics are welcome at first, but since there's no real way to heal ingame, most encounters (outside of the Ferals) are over as soon as they start to balance for it, and the few prolonged fights are total death marches without rejuv field+tactical recharge
The progression: tangible, and some of the aug abilities and armour sets are really nice (I never let go of the ability to summon a Spider Bot army once I got it), but the balancing is awful - as an example you want a Digital weapon at all times after a certain point because that's the only decent way to damage robots, and there's exactly one Digital weapon in the game. A shotgun you need to fire point blank in a game that'll happily murder you outside of cover, unless you're overlevelled/geared.

Could keep going but won't. Every single point about the game has a fair few qualifiers that make you go eeeeeh as to how you feel about it. Apart from the art. It's so nice.
I enjoyed it, but I can't honestly say I'd have finished it if it was a low-res pixelart game that relied on the gameplay and music.