What is the most visually impressive indie game you’ve ever seen? From our perspective, The Ascent – released last summer for PC and Xbox – is a strong candidate. This Unreal Engine 4-based isometric action game features dense environmental geometry, great lighting, and high quality effects work. It’s easily mistaken for a big-budget title but was in fact primarily made by Neon Giant, a small Swedish studio with just 12 core developers. Previously an Xbox console exclusive, The Ascent is now available for current-gen and last-gen PlayStation consoles – and we highly recommend it.
Whether you’re gaming on PS4 or PS5, The Ascent retains its signature visual appeal – it’s a beautiful title that combines extremely detailed environmental geometry with stunning pyrotechnics. As action breaks out The Ascent becomes an electrifying visual showcase, bathed in explosions and bullet trails. The interplay between the environment and the action is a key highlight here: stray bullets and explosions chip at barriers and take chunks out of concrete slabs. Despite massive levels packed with dense environmental meshes, everything seems to fit together surprisingly well, without any geometric or lighting discontinuities. Even the game’s narrative sequences, which zoom in to close range, don’t highlight many shortcomings.
So how do the ports to the various PlayStation platforms stack up? While we didn’t see it in our measurements, dynamic resolution scaling can’t be rolled out – but unsurprisingly, PS5 leads the pack with a dense 1800p resolution, targeting 60fps, while PS4 Pro drops back to 1440p30. The base PS4 seemingly locks to 900p – a quarter of PS5’s resolution at half the target performance level. Image quality isn’t bad: UE4’s TAA does a good job of cleaning up the image, so all consoles look stable and smooth in motion – the weaker machines just aren’t as sharp.
The improvement found on PS5 isn’t just limited to pixels and frame-rate: ground detail is pared back on PS4, environmental draw distance is reined in, while real-time shadow maps have less detail, while fewer objects cast shadows. Bloom lighting takes on a different appearance, and generally looks weaker and less precise. The depth of field effect in cutscenes runs at a reduced quality, without a strong bokeh effect. Finally, the number of background NPCs in the environment is reduced. PS4 Pro occupies a bit of a middle ground here – depth of field, bloom, and NPC density appear similar to PS5, while other settings look similar to PS4.