Released as part of the PlayStation Talent project, Jade’s Ascension is built by a team new to game development but given their chance to release a commercial game. This is an intriguingly themed top-down arena shooter for 1-4 players to cooperatively scale elemental towers inspired by Chinese mythology.
Each tower has its own element such as fire, water, wind or Earth and has its own coloured theme and unique enemies inside them. Once you choose your character (they all play identically) you will start on floor 1 of a tower and kill various waves of enemies. You’ll do this by moving with one analogue whilst aiming your magic shot with the other and firing with a trigger button. If you get into a tricky spot you can dash out of the way too and whilst there are some pickups for special weapons like bombs, they are few and far between and often not very powerful. The main gameplay is run, gun and dodge in small square arenas to survive the floor.
Once a floor comes to an end a shop appears if you’d like to upgrade the power, speed and range of your character but the big choice is whether or not you ascend to the next floor of your current tower or choose to move to another one. The more often you move, the more money you’ll gain over time which in theory means your character will be stronger. This is especially helpful if you invest in buying more health. However, you can continue up the current tower and in theory, reach the boss, conquer them and move to another one afterwards. The choice is entirely yours.
I say in theory because, in reality, I found Jade’s Ascension extremely vague on its progression. Sometimes I’d play a run and reach a boss on the 15th floor of a tower. Another time it was level 60. Another time I passed 170 levels moving between towers constantly and didn’t find a boss at all. You can’t save (at least not on the PS4 version I bought anyway) and so if you give up at any point, your run is over. This feels like such a huge oversight for what seems to be a totally RNG-based game structure. It wastes the players’ time and that is unforgivable in 2024. It is also wildly inconsistent since a run could in theory end so quickly or just stretch on for hours to never end and it’s not your fault.
This wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating if the moment-to-moment gameplay was tight and responsive. Jade’s Ascension is very floaty. Characters aren’t grounded so sometimes it is difficult to tell whether an attack will hit you – especially from airborne enemies. The perspective just isn’t helpful. Once you get used to the floaty controls, Jade’s Ascension isn’t bad but 20 enemies to kill over and over for multiple hours in one big session gets stale very quickly. I wished the game had a tighter structure to make it more impactful.
The structure for something better is here but it’s too loosely held together and stretched out thinly to be enjoyable. A save game system and some better visual clues about what is going to hit you would be where I’d focus my dev time to make this more of an approachable game. A bit of a miss sadly.
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