Underworld Ascendant E3 Trailer, Previews

Underworld Ascendant, Otherside Entertainment’s upcoming dungeon-crawling immersive sim is going to be playable at this year’s E3, and in order to get us excited for that, the developers have put together a new trailer that apart from some rope-swinging and skeleton bashing gameplay announces a new release window for the game – September 2018. Check it out:

On top of that, a couple of hands-on previews for the game have gone up recently, both of them unfortunately quite negative. Have a look:

PC Gamer isn’t fond of the game’s clunkiness:

One spell whips up all the physics objects nearby to bash skeletons with, but in use the objects got caught on the environment, monsters, and each other in a glitchy tornado of boxes (so many boxes). It looked like the beginning of a terrible mistake in Garry’s Mod, not the deft work of a wizard-warrior descending into the Stygian Abyss, and I didn’t feel as though I had much control over the mess anyway. The role-playing curtain pulled back to reveal the videogame often in such a short demo.

Ascendant is likely to leave immersive sims exactly where they were. That’s fine, but what’s left is a 3D homage to Ultima Underworld stripped of the theatrics and imagination required to convincingly roleplay a character, a physics-based puzzle game wrapped in a cliched cartoon fantasy template with some neat tools and clever uses for them. Even so, I’m not sold on its world, the novelty of its toolset, or simply how its most basic actions feel to control. OtherSide’s ambition is clear, but Ascendant just doesn’t feel ready to be released anytime soon. If it has to be, I hope it at least manages to be an obtuse, messy game with interesting enough level design and skill combinations to hold it all together.

Ars Technica calls it Underwhelm Ascendant:

For a design staff that has so many luminaries among its ranks—none higher than Warren Spector, arguably—the fruits of its labor thus far play like a mountain of compromise. The demo didn’t disabuse my notion that OtherSide might just be hustling to get this years-old project out the door with its current series of “yes, you can set stuff on fire and do other elemental tricks” duct-taped together. And a lower-scaled sales pitch might just be fine! “Our skeletons are dumb, and our spells are kind of busted, and our questing is limited, but you’ll have enough fun with the janky stuff, we swear.” I could endure that.

But Fielder aimed high with his pre-E3 sales pitch, and it just didn’t match the game I played. Unless OtherSide has some seriously surprising material still hiding in its vaults—a bunch of incredible, branching dungeon designs, or a wealth of new elemental powers, or, gosh, yet another launch delay—anybody looking forward to Underworld Ascendant should be very careful with their optimism.