Ascendant Infinity Preview – Adapt and thrive in this 80s fuelled online shooter

14.03.2024 - 18:49 / thesixthaxis.com

The first thing that’s sure to grab you about Ascendant Infinity is just how 80s everything feels. This is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the end of the world didn’t happen now in our time of rapidly advancing AI and robotics, but rather saw the last vestiges of mankind put into a cultural stasis in the era of cheesy sitcom title music, ludicrously big hair, synths and bumbags. Also, wildly advance biotech

You see, the game’s history diverged from our own back in the early 1900s with a combination of both manmade and natural disasters shoving us down a different path in a period known as The Cascade. Through this there were huge investments in biotech, which naturally led to bioweapons, and those naturally led to wars that worsened the situation, until the only option left was for the privileged few to be shoved into cryosleep and wait until things (hopefully) get better.

Even those best laid plans don’t quite go to plan, so while each vault’s Earthtree is planted a few hundred years later, starting to clean the soil and water, you don’t wake up until around 1000 years later than intended. And now there’s a fresh war for resources between the various vaults.

Ascendant Infinity puts a fresh spin on the sandbox of online first person shooters. Instead of a joining the throngs of battle royale attempts, or going old school with more simple head-to-head game modes, it’s a fusion of the two styles. This is a 3v3v3v3 competitive game with PlayFusion unashamedly referring to Apex Legends in terms of the gunplay feel that they’re going for, but there’s a different ethos for the game structure, both in terms of objective and how the map changes between rounds.

Each mission takes you to the nearby Earthtree of Harmony, where all the survivors have mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind a bounty of previous Biocore Amber that is the vital resource to your own continued survival. The goal is to get in, get a Biocore and get it back out, but there’s only enough juice for three cores, and there’s four teams. Someone is going to go without… but it’s going to be rare for an easy extraction, because once that first core has been lifted, there’s now four teams fighting over two cores, and then just one.

PlayFusion brand Ascendant Infinity as an ‘Adaption Shooter’, but what does that really mean? Well, instead of having a Battle Royale style ring closing in on you, instead the map of Harmony has different areas and potential events that can open up depending how the AI game director chooses to remix it each time. A lot of these can be triggered and directed by the players, with things like missile strikes, EMPs, bosses and hulking great big vehicles all liable to appear.

It might feel like a no-brainer to launch