The Ascent
Neon Giant’s debut title, The Ascent, looked damn cool. An isometric twin-stick shooter not unlike Arrowhead Game Studios’ Helldivers, The Ascent unfortunately suffered some terrible issues around multiplayer at launch. Actually, the co-op feature, the game’s most heavily promoted aspect, straight-up didn’t work at all. An update dropped in September to address the multiplayer’s stability problems, but in fixing some issues, it ended up creating many others, with players reporting significant frame rate drops, persistent game crashes, and even whole characters getting wiped when starting up a co-op server. Though Neon Giant found much to reflect on in The Ascent’s messy launch, the game still turned out pretty successfully for the first-time developer, which consists of just 12 people.
