Underworld Ascendant Critic Reviews

If everything else worked as expected, it would be a great game, but at the moment all its good intentions fall behind too many technical issues.

Really, I’ve had it with the premature release of unfinished projects and their bugs. But even when everything works, this is a rather mediocre fantasy adventure that vainly tries to recapture the fascination of an Ultima Underworld.

Despite all the freedom for the player, Underworld Ascendant is a bug-spectacle that, in spite of its great looks, is more boring than thrilling.

Underworld Ascendant is clearly an unfinished game, full of technical bugs and poor in content. This isnt’ the way backers and many fans of the series should have been treated.

There’s a game behind the many issues and flaws of Underworld Ascendant; we just don’t know when (or if) we might see it one day.

Not even the evidence of an excellent level design resolves, therefore, the fate of a title that should have, together with System Shock 3 (which the same team is working on), revive the genre of immersive sims.

Underworld Ascendant is a good idea poorly executed.

Unfortunately the game is an unrefined mess, full of bugs, framerate drops and bad physics. It’s more a puzzle-platformer with stealth and some basic rpg elements instead of an rpg dungeon crawler, and it’s not so immersive and free as the developers think. Maybe it will be improved, in fact the graphic it’s good and so the locations design, but right now it’s not the spiritual successor that backers deserved.

Bad ideas and bad errors, with glitches and bugs. The feeling is of a game not completed, with no polishing at all.

Technically unfinished RPG full of dubious content choices that kills the fun instead of expanding the legacy of Ultima Underworld. It’s not even a good RPG.

Even truckloads of patches couldn’t save this roleplaying mess from being one of the worst releases we’ve seen the entire year. Avoid at all costs.

Underworld Ascendant is a buggy, repetitive, and boring mess of an RPG.

Underworld Ascendant touches on something but never really grasps it. It doesn't utilise any of the improvements from its long absence from the industry and even falls flat compared to the game it is meant to be the successor of.

Every mechanic to the game needs drastic improvements, and it's just plain unfortunate that Otherside Entertainment released the game as-is.

Riddled with bugs and bizarre mechanics, Underworld Ascendant is a bafflingly poor debut from OtherSide Entertainment.

Framed as a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld, Underworld Ascendant misses the mark with almost every shot, much like my aforementioned hapless archer. At the same time, even freed from the expectations its historical baggage brings, it is a clear failure. The spirit of Ultima Underworld lives on elsewhere.

The game is a failure due to an obviously rushed development from a team that is known to be skilled. Filled with bugs and poorly scenarised, it’s an RPG with a repetitive and bad combat system, set in a universe with a very limited art design.

Underworld Ascendant is a disgraceful mess in terms of both design and execution.

Underworld Ascendant is surprisingly unpolished and actively difficult to play. Without patches addressing the myriad bugs present in the current product, this one is a hard pass.

A blatantly unfinished and uninspired nostalgia project that sheds a certain, peculiar light on the immersive sim at large.