505 Games and Otherside Entertainment announced that Underworld Ascendant is currently available on the Steam store for $29.99. The game has a special 15% off promotion where you can get it for just $25.49 during the first week of being on sale. Additionally, if you buy before November 21st you’ll gain access to the companion creature Vorpa, the Mana Leech, and the Underworld map.
The new entry in the Underworld franchise is a first-person hack-and-slash, physics-based dungeon crawler. Players will enter into the Stygian Abyss and attempt to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, utilize stealth where necessary, and acquire new skills to overcome whatever challenges stand in your way.
The hook for the game is that the Stygian Abyss is an ever-changing, constantly evolving dungeon. You have to uncover the lost secrets, raise your affinity with various factions, and attempt to utilize the environment to your favor in order to overcome the odds.
The launch of the game has not gone over quite as well as Otherside Entertainment probably would have liked. There’s a healthy number of negative reviews filling up the user review section on the Steam store page. The more reviews that come in the more they seem to veer on the side of negativity, however.
The reviews all cite how the controls are cumbersome; that there’s a lot of clipping issues; that the movement is sluggish and feels like the character is “rolling around on a medicine ball”; and that there were issues with saving the game.
Dave Bardwell summed up his issues with the game in just two short paragraphs, writing…
“Why, why, why do games these days refuse to put in the ability to save when you please? Unable to finish that level you’ve been playing for a couple of hours now because real life is requiring you to do something else? Well I hope you enjoy having to do it all over again from the start of level because that’s exactly what you’ll be doing.
“This alone means I will not play this until a save anywhere feature is added, and is why I cannot recommend this.”
Many reviewers pointed out that the enemy AI is pretty bad, and that the level design is “bland”. User Saffron wrote in their review…
“The current release keeps crashing. There are blatant bugs like you’re unable to change the language to English (In my game it started as Spanish and even if I set English it’s still showing Spanish).
“The game is nothing like Ultima Underworld, it doesn’t have the factions, the interconected maze/dungeon, the dialogs, the storytelling, nothing.”
It’s not looking good, and it seems like the game could have used a few months (or more) in Early Access before launching.
If you want to check out all the bug reports, complaints, and thumbs-down reviews, feel free to hit up the game’s Steam page.
