Awesome game to play for long hours! great idea. Keeps you into leveling up,create a monster wnd decide whether unwant to fight for light,dark, or emptyness, make others chanye by force. Or they force you to convert by way of force or intimidation. Its free!
I rate this game as "Excellent", for the price point you can't go wrong. As RPG's go, I think the game has better value than Defiance had, and it's $50 dollars less (FREE).
Bloody and based on a fun battle system, Ascend: Hand of Kul is a free-to-play videogame which implements some interesting ideas without managing to exploit them to their full potential. It is a nice hack'n slash experience partially marred by some of its F2P elements.
Distinctly average, and aside from a few interesting online elements there's little to keep you coming back for more after your first few hours of gameplay. [Issue#104, p.84]
Although this simple brawler has some intriguing multiplayer ideas, the solo game's repetitive and the Crusade metagame is hard to invest in. [Dec 2013, p.87]
For the record, Ascend is nothing like Mafia wars or Farmville. It resembles more DarkSouls than anything else. I love the fact that this game is free and I can pay for what I want when I want. No reason not to download Ascend and at least try it. The game itself is more of an action/RPG with some cool multiplayer light components that allows you to help or curse other players. You can Ascend your Caos and have them control territories which brings in cash for you. You can collect a ton of armor and items all while leveling up your Caos. Intereacting with other players is really cool, and yet hard to describe, you gotta play to see it. Anyways, well worth the free download if anything just to check out. Best F2P game easy on XBOX Live. Looking forward seeing how Microsoft evolves this game over time.
The only real problem I have with the game is that people who have the extra cash will instantly get better gear than you. It goes from who's better at the game to who has the most money.
I decided to try it because I had read others describe it as "like Dark Souls", the game is certainly nothing like the play-style found in Dark Souls, quite the opposite really. The only elements you will find here that are similar to Dark Souls are the fact that things drop souls for you to collect when they die, and the PvP system(if you want to call it that) or way of interrupting the worlds of other players is certainly a beefed up copycat of the Dark Souls "see phantoms from other worlds" system. Sending NPCs after player phantoms isn't exactly PvP in my book. Whether or not that is bad will be up for you to decide.
What this game does have is a few features that I have yet to see anywhere else. Neat "bells" that certainly make you do a double take. Your character in the game is quite larger than humans, you are probably the size of a building. Multiple humans can ride you into battle, you can eat/throw these humans. You convert human alters to the faction of your choosing (you pick from Light/Void/Dark at the beginning of the game) and it's a way of controlling territory in the multiplayer aspect of the game. Faction influence seems to play a large part in the end-game PvP/Multiplayer.
All of the Armor and Weapons are purchased with Souls you have collected. You can also speed up this process with micro transactions, and they are everywhere. Free to play games with micro transactions are quite common these days, as far as I could discern there are no weapons available only to paying customers, so at most you're saving yourself a few hours by spending cash. There seems to be an agenda here on Metacritic where a lot of reviewers are calling the title, "pay to win" however from what I saw everything in the game can be attained without spending a dime. At most you're paying to skip a grind, which is something I don't want to downplay because it is a growing issue, but certainly not "pay to win" where players get unfair advantages with items or abilities only attainable through a cash shop.
For me the biggest deterrent of the cash shop to me was the lacking gameplay. For lack of a better term the combat is quite "Vanilla", a hack and slash with a few extra abilities determined again by the faction you choose. Weapons seem to offer different abilities, but nothing that was able to keep me interested. For me combat is where the bulk of my score deduction took place. Points were deducted for overall clumsiness and the lack of fluidity in combat. It seems like difficulty is increased by outright swarming the player with hordes of enemies where damage becomes inevitable no matter how well you play.
The artwork isn't spectacular but I wouldn't consider it bad either. Actually I found it quite nice to look at. It certainly should not be something that keeps you from playing the game.
Overall this game is something new to try, but nothing I would plan on spending a weekend on. To me it has potential to have a good foothold in the market as a free to play game because it looks so promising for what it is in Beta. In the grand scheme of things though it can seem quite elementary. The title has a long way to go if it plans on trading punches with anything beyond smartphone titles. I gave it a 7 because the foundation looks nice, but without the addition more complex core gameplay mechanics the game is going to be left behind the times. Push the cash shop to the side and work on combat/core gameplay if you want your title to succeed.
i have a couple big problems with it besides some minor glitches the difficulty spikes are very high especially when you fight your first ogre it threw the entire session i was playing off the witch things are much harder than are necessary especially in large groups they are horrid the prices need to go down or souls go up per kill so i dont feel pressured to go and spend 80 bucks i say this only because i have found myself high leveled and no armor no weapons no money and in a large fight and it **** just dumb down the difficulty this is my fifteenth RPG and i dont want it to leave a bad taste in my mouth i want to continue but dont want it to be a chore
This in not a great game but not the worst I've played. The Ascension leveling it a cool feature but having to purchase pedestals every time you ascend if you want to keep your armor an weapons you have just spent a lot of souls and time upgrading is beyond frustrating. The amount of souls gained in game either from killing enemies or the almost pathetic amount gained from selling weapons and armor is just enough to repair your equipment..... sometimes but that's about it. If you want a good weapon or armor you'll have to shell out the cash. Then it's not enough to buy the item on the avg a mid range item will costs 100K to 120k souls each to upgrade fully. The developers have made no attempt to hide the fact that they want you to spend a huge amount of money on your character. There are very few aspects of the game that don't cost souls and not just a few souls but a lot of souls. There are good aspects to the game stomping and throwing humans was fun for a min, Having the humans climb on you adding some protection and extra attacks to enemies is cool but that's about it. RPGs are my favorite games and I was looking forward to playing this one, but I have to say with the glitchy game play the slap to the face every time you have to spend thousands of souls just to repair your equipment let alone level up just to spend thousands more to keep it when you ascend detracts from what could have been a fairly fun game. This game has no replay value in my opinion and gets old and repetitive way to fast.
SummaryEnter the world as Caos, a gigantic breed of mighty warriors created to serve the will of the Gods. Combat the immortal Titans while fending off attacks from rival players and establishing your influence in the global Ascend conflict. Epic three-scale combat takes place across immense landscapes and limitless dungeons. "Ascend"...