Underworld Ascendant

Underworld Ascendant came to my attention because it’s technically Ultima Underworld 3. It was developed by OtherSide Entertainment, a studio with a ton of Looking Glass Studios alumni, so people were very excited for it because they were finally getting a new entry in the UU series after well over 20 years. Even better, with some of the notable names behind the original games attached. A lot of fans put their trust in OtherSide, as evidenced by the game’s successful Kickstarter. When the game came out however, people were not happy. I've even heard some people go as far as to describe Underworld Ascendant as the worst immersive sim ever made. I was morbidly fascinated with the idea that an immersive sim could be that bad, so once the price of the game dropped to below $5, I bought it right away. Believe me when I tell you: This game is horrendous. I’m genuinely stunned at the names that were involved because in addition to being a bad game, 90% of it doesn’t feel anything like UU.

Among the most disappointing elements of Ascendant are those that are completely at odds with what came previously in the Underworld series. For example, the game is linear. A key aspect of Ultima Underworld games is that they take place in complex, interconnected dungeons with various entrances and exits to different levels on each floor. As you played the game, you would go back and forth between levels in a freeform manner to do various objectives in your journey, often in a non-linear fashion where specific quests didn’t have to be completed in any specific order. In Ascendant, you just go from floor to floor in order via the same staircase and do a few quests in each, warping back to a hub to resupply when the need arises. While the individual level design is actually pretty solid, it still lacks the cohesion and freedom of UU’s maps. Speaking of quests, Ascendant, in stark contrast to its predecessors, has some of the most dull, boring, bottom of the barrel quest design I’ve seen in an RPG. All of them are either kill quests or fetch quests. You go to a new floor and either kill things, get things, or free people, go to a new floor, and the cycle continues. Even the immersive sim elements are disappointing. There are cool things you can do, like burn down enemy structures by lighting wood on fire, burn through wooden doors, and turn enemies against one another by getting them to hit each other, but the instances of emergent gameplay feel very deliberate and specific, not arising in spontaneous or surprising ways. You can’t find alternate methods of completing quests by smart use of game mechanics like in the Ultima Underworld games, you can’t kill/KO enemies by dropping small but heavy objects on their heads like in Thief, you can’t organically find enemy weaknesses and exploit them like in Prey, I could go on but I think you get the point.

Even if you disregard all the shortcomings when compared to the Ultima Underworld games, the core mechanics of Ascendant just aren’t good. Melee combat functions but doesn’t feel satisfying or smooth, especially since the weapon reach for melee weapons is surprisingly short. Furthermore, enemy attack animations are very jerky and random, making it hard to read what they’re going to do next. Ranged combat is somewhat better, though finding arrows for the bow isn’t always easy. I’m fine with how magic works via collecting runes and experimenting, but the magic system has its own problems that prevent it from being worth using. When you discover a new spell, the game sometimes doesn’t tell you what it does and you can’t test it unless you figure out what it’s supposed to target. You can also find spell formulas in the wild, but these are written randomly on walls in the environment and are easily missable. On that note, Ascendant has a really odd way of handling mana. There are no mana potions and you have to recover mana by collecting bits of it that float around the game world like fireflies or something. Your mana pool also isn’t very big, so you can only cast a few spells before needing to find more. As Ascendant is an RPG, it has a progression system with three skill trees to enhance your abilities and give new ones. Here lies one of the most baffling design decisions in the entire game, and maybe in gaming history. Are you ready for this? You don’t earn skill points by earning XP and leveling up, you earn them by completing in-game achievements called “feats”. Wait, it gets worse: the game doesn’t tell you what these feats are. So this effectively results in you flying blind, hoping that the things you do count as feats so you can get a few upgrades to make things easier for yourself as the game gets harder and harder.

Ascendant, like Ultima Underworld, also has some survival elements. Unlike Ultima Underworld, Ascendant has managed to implement them in the worst way imaginable. It has weapon durability (yipee) and if you use melee heavily, you can wear down your weapons pretty significantly in very little time. Armor fares even worse, becoming worn extremely quickly. The worst part about all of this is that there is no easy way to repair your equipment. The only way to do so is to buy two magic wands that repair metal and leather items respectively, and even then you can’t repair more advanced equipment like enchanted items. This means you’re constantly switching weapons and armor, never getting a good feel for what you’re using. On top of this, Ascendant has a hunger mechanic. Your character has to constantly eat or else they will move slower and lose access to some abilities. If you don’t eat something every 5 minutes or so, you will quickly find yourself handicapped. Not only is this annoying, but there isn’t a lot of food in this game so you will have instances where you’re navigating a map and you’ll suddenly be starving to death far from any vendor.

In terms of graphics, Underworld Ascendant is a mixed bag. While I think the art direction is genuinely great and one of the only redeeming qualities, many of the actual textures and models look very cheap, low quality, or just plain strange. The limited budget of the game really shows here. When you start a new game, it even shows you that your character doesn’t even have a model and is literally just a pair of arms floating in front of a garish UI that looks like it was lifted from a mobile game.

Clearly I’ve had a lot to say about Ascendant, but as if the actual core design of it didn’t have enough issues, this abandoned trashfire of a game still has a Bethesda title’s worth of bugs and technical problems. When a game freezes and almost hard crashes as it is opening when you first run it, you know you’re in for something special. Among the most notable problems here is that the AI will occasionally just stop working. Enemies will idle randomly and not respond to any damage or react to your presence in any way. Allied NPCs will often just stand still and not help you at all while you’re getting swarmed by enemies. Sometimes NPCs will run in random directions before remembering where they were supposed to go and continuing on. Ascendant also has a very questionable physics system where powerful melee attacks will often send enemies flying across the room like they got shot out of a cannon. This can occasionally happen to the player as well. Another common oddity I faced was my character randomly dying for no reason when performing mundane tasks. One time I died while holding a box, one time I died while planting the respawn sapling and hell, one time I died while I was doing literally nothing. Beyond that, the game still has numerous features that are only half implemented or not working. For example, climbing chains results in wild, mostly uncontrollable swinging and doesn’t even have an animation, so your arms are still holding your weapon while you climb them. There is also a faction system that doesn’t do anything, pets with functions that only work sometimes, and a whole host of other problems. The craziest part is this is considered the “fixed” game. When it launched in 2018, it was apparently significantly worse. There were weapons disappearing, structures popping in and out of existence, a save system that actually erased your progress, and much more. The fact that the game still, to this day, is nothing resembling finished yet hasn’t been updated since 2019 shows that this was a doomed project from a very early stage.

Underworld Ascendant goes beyond disappointing and enters the realm of being utterly confounding. I can’t help but wonder what the hell went wrong with this game considering the talent that worked on it. Needless to say, I do not recommend this incredibly cursed dungeon crawler. Hopefully OtherSide can redeem themselves with their next title, but only time will tell. In the meantime, if you like the Ultima Underworld games and want to experience something similar, just play Arx Fatalis.