Recent reviews by joinTee

Fun initially but gets boring before reaching even 50% completion.
The level design is somewhat varied but since most rooms just trigger spawns on entering or when pushing a button that doesn't really make a big difference.
Weapons constantly run out of ammo and apart from flat damage numbers and some of them being better for long range combat I don't feel like there's a big difference between them.

A Vampire Survivors like game with a DRG theme slapped onto it. Initially I was put off by the latter because the main reason to play DRG is the great co-op synergy between character classes. However after getting used to the fact that this singleplayer game is indeed a singleplayer game I got quite fond of playing a round or two in between.

With my character classes barely above level 10 (at time of review) and up to hazard 3 difficulty only I cannot yet tell whether the scaling is fine. If upgrades are chosen wisely getting the final Dreadnought down appears to be manageable in the first two difficulties at least.

Nags/Issues/Bugs I encountered apart from the literal bugs that crawl around, nothing major:
- The zoom level of the map feels pretty close, making somewhat planned movement to finish the mission goal (pick up flowers or mushrooms or mine morkite) rather hard
- Dreadnought jumps feel incredibly hard to tell beforehand so evading him is really hit and miss (movement speed helps but still...).
- Damage when forced to go past a crowd of enemies often feels random (keep your distance!)
- Weapon sounds getting stuck past the end of a round (last upgrade is said to fix that but didn't for the flamethrower background sound)
- Loot bugs do not seem to take damage from anything but the dwarf's pickaxe/drill (they seem immune against fire and other explosions)
- Magma core with all the hot lava is as annoying as in DRG
- RNGesus sometimes just doesn't like me ;)

Can't recommend this compared to DL1. The parkour in the first game already felt random at times (I triggered the 180° wall-turn + jump way too often). In DL2 with even more keys that control movement it feels next to impossible to do the right move. Prepare to die through falling damage a lot. This may be caused by DL2 having much higher and generally more tall buildings than the first one. The other issue I had is the parachute closing way too easily (Z, Space and left mouse all do that) so ended up opening and then immediately closing the parachute while jumping off a building.

The missions so far feel a lot like in DL1 but due to the vastly bigger map they tend to take longer to complete because you have to run back and forth a lot (fast travel helps a bit but requires unlocking fast travel points first). There seem to be more puzzle missions but things like the power plants feel rather tedious and not entertaining at all.

I think I'll get back to DL1 and finish the second story driving around with a buggy, that was much more fun.

On the upside the game works out of the box with Proton 8.0 on Linux and an AMD GPU and hasn't crashed a single time. Multiplayer worked fine although with some black screen delays at the end of cut-scenes which does not seem to happen when playing alone.

The Ascent is an isometric shooter with really great graphics (if your machine can handle it) and not too shabby background tunes (overall the atmosphere in the "cities" is great).

Both weapons and augmentations need a bit time to get used to since there are different damage types and augmentations ranging from attacks over distractions for enemies to pure utilities. One actually has to switch between them depending on the mission and situation so there's no "best" loadout that kills everything and the cat (or at least not in my current playthrough which is around lvl. 24).

Despite the claims of the game being buggy and crashing a lot I didn't have too many problems in my first 20 hours of solo play:
- Only two crashes, one actually after exiting the game
- One broken trigger on a main mission where some enemies did not spawn. Alt+F4 + restart from last checkpoint fixed that though

Finally I'm playing this on Ubuntu 22.04 with Proton 8.0.
Neither had issues with my old GeForce GTX 1070 nor with the current Radeon RX 7900 XT.

No, this game has nothing to do with extra large ding dongs, it does however have a similar theme and that is beating hiscores ;)

Another nice remake, although I have to confess that I don't remember playing this back in the 80ies.
Powerups and energy seem to be plentiful at first but excessive shooting still quickly left me with no shots left so the game certainly is easy to get into but needs a lot more practice to master it (so basically the essence of most arcade games).

Works fine on Linux except for the startup screen being black, no graphical issues in the actual game.

The single player missions feel almost exactly like Descent 2 did back then. Indeed a faithful remake and cross-platform just like the old games.

I'll stay away from this after they dropped Linux support and sold out to Epic

A worthy successor to SteamWorld Dig 1. Adds more movement variations and is otherwise very similar to the first version. If you just want to continue digging this is pretty much worth it.

Totally digging this ;)