Underworld Ascendant Review

By DM Schmeyer

I had finally done it. After several hours of navigating bugs and glitches, surviving enemies whose AI seemed to ping-pong between omniscient and ludicrously stupid, and maze-like level design, I had reached the end of an area of Underworld Ascendant that had given me considerable trouble. I actually paused, allowed myself to feel that relief and euphoria one gets when they never have to look at something terrible again. The portal to the exit was before me. I stepped forward.

…And fell through the floor, as the geometry of the Stygian Abyss decided arbitrarily to render itself ethereal. The Ascendant, Underworld’s protagonist, plummeted into some sort of netherscape that forced a reset to escape, and, thanks to Underworld Ascendant’s ludicrous save system, all progress in the level in question was lost. An entire night spent meticulously poking around, exploring, fighting, and sneaking was rendered moot by something beyond my control.

Now repeat that countless times, and this about summarizes the Underworld Ascendant experience.

Much like a magician practicing the art of misdirection, an RPG can do a lot to deflect from its flaws with great storytelling and a clear sense of identity. Bethesda’s beloved yet notoriously buggy Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are perhaps the poster child for this. However, Underworld Ascendant fails to create even this illusion and offers only a generic, bare-bones story: the anonymous Chosen One must check some boxes in order to face off with the ancient evil threatening to end/take over the world. It explores this rather tropey plot in ways that are neither particularly interesting or different – At no point did I really care what was happening, and at no point did I feel any suspense or pressure. A doomsday clock ticks down, so Underworld tells you, but it never hit zero in the 20 or so painful hours I spent with it.

I’ll give it credit, though, for some good intentions in the design and some creative ideas at work, even if they’re executed poorly. The character progression system is conceptually interesting in that the more you play with the magic, stealth, and combat mechanics to creatively dispatch enemies and navigate the levels, the more you’re rewarded. The skill point I earned for luring a group of skeletons into a room with a wooden floor and furniture and then lighting the entire thing on fire and leaving them to burn was probably Underworld’s high-water mark with me. The time I provoked a monster to lash out in anger and mow down the foes surrounding it was a close second.

What’s unfortunate is that those rewards just don’t matter much because the upgrades have only a small effect on moment-to-moment gameplay. I never really felt powerful no matter how far I progressed down the combat tree, and my survival in any given encounter was dictated as much by whether the AI decided it would fight back as by my own abilities. The combat system is little more than swinging a weapon and blocking with it, the kind of simple and uninteresting melee that has felt out of date since even before The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Enemies participate in a way that seems genuine for rote, mindless adversaries, in that they’d often seem to forget they had a weapon in hand despite absorbing a barrage of blows, only to suddenly remember that they could also swing a sword and dispatch me in a couple of wildly overpowered hits. Facing off against a dangerous foe who suddenly forgets to do anything but block or, occasionally, forgets to do anything but die, is a cheap and unsatisfying form of relief.

The magic system had potential, at least. It’s systemically interesting, with spellcasting relying on rune combinations and on single spells tied to wands, and is more about manipulating the environment and combining effects than simply raining fireballs like a mobile artillery unit. This can lead to some moments of rewarding creativity, like retrieving that last fired arrow you still have need of or brainwashing an enemy so you can slip past it instead of undertaking a difficult fight. Unfortunately, magic never felt like the difference-maker it seems intended to be, and it occupied more of a novelty role in my adventures. Mana drains quick, Move Wood sometimes doesn’t move wood, shield spells don’t always stop swords and axes, and magical effects seemed to light things on fire at the most inconvenient times for reasons I couldn’t quite identify. If there’s one positive quality of the melee system, it’s that at least things didn’t spontaneously combust when whacked with a sword.

Bugs and bizarre AI defang the stealth component almost entirely. Sometimes enemies spotted me for no discernible reason, sometimes they didn’t remember they were supposed to be hostile, and sometimes Underworld’s sensitive physics simulation produced loud noises and/or fires that wrecked my sneaking and punished me for trying to take an indirect route. One incident that comically stands out involved my brushing against a basket which then flew down a hallway as if shot out of a cannon, hitting a skeleton square between the eyes and prompting it to amble towards me to investigate. So if a room had bottles in it, I was probably going to break them simply by virtue of my entering and poking around. Some of these bottles are red and burst into flame once broken, and are hilariously easy to accidentally shatter. The result? More unintentional fire, more being discovered by the light and sound that resulted, and less stealth.

All of these flaws can lead to death, frustration, and getting caught out in the environment, which is especially bad because the save system in Underworld Ascendant is horrible. In each level you can tote around a portable checkpoint called a silver sapling, but this only saves you from death, and even then only if you remembered to plant it somewhere close to where you were about to die. And here, there are things worse than death: should you need to exit the level, or should said level crash or be broken by a bug, all progress is lost in its entirety and you are returned to the hub. The frustration that stems from this remarkably bad idea casts its shadow over everything. The intention may well have been to make each level feel contained and like a sandbox, but when an entire run can be thwarted because the item you’re sent to collect doesn’t even spawn, there is no way to salvage the fun. All that’s left is a deep sense of irritation.

The levels themselves – all seven of them – usually consist of a series of hallways with traps, obstacles, and several sets of large rooms with a tower, a castle, or some other structure featured. Their aesthetic is of the Underground Fantasy Cave variety,  but each level was just different enough to feel like a new place and my first time through each managed to be minimally engaging. Most levels include some grand structure where the bulk of the objectives reside, and if any part of the environments of Underworld can ever be said to be interesting, it’s these locations. That first time through a new dungeon isn’t the last, however. Not remotely.

Progress is measured in the favor and influence you develop with “the Factions,” which is probably the most cliche fantasy name for a group ever. You make that progress by taking missions given by each Faction, with some bonuses thrown in for completing the mission in a certain random way, like avoiding being detected or not equipping any weapons. (I never managed to actually complete one of these side objectives due to the aforementioned issues, save the one time a mission just inexplicably auto-completed the moment I took it.) The problem is that you can only undertake one mission at a time, and upon completing it must return to grab another assignment, which often involves returning to the level you just left. And if that disappointment sundae needed a cherry, all the doors are once again sealed, the obstacles reset, the enemies respawned, and everything else set back to square one. Underworld thus becomes exhaustingly repetitive, and that’s without the many resets caused by technical issues or real-world distractions. You spend so much time repeatedly returning to each of Underworld’s levels that it’s hard not to become sick of them.

It’d be hard enough to enjoy such a flawed game design, but Underworld is the buggiest experience I’ve had in years on top of that. It’s crashed a dozen times on me in the long loading screens alone. I fell through solid floors and jumped through solid doors and frames. I waltzed through the final room of an early dungeon because a skeleton got hung up on a chandelier, clipped into it, and dragged it onto the pressure plate that opened the final gate, all before I had even arrived. Water arrows pass through torches without snuffing them, and magic often doesn’t work as advertised: Several times I’d try to call a box or a board with my Move Wood magic wand and somehow set everything on fire instead. Enemies get stuck in their blocking animation and simply stand in place twitching while getting the ugly hacked off of them. That’s not a quick task: One particular skeleton knight stood in front of me and absorbed some 20 attacks before it remembered it was supposed to fall down. And, of course, with the awful save system looming in the background, any one of these bugs can light time and progress on fire as surely as they can any random object.