Legacy of Kain: Ascendance review

Legacy of Kain is the kind of series where everyone needs to take a big hit of the bong before it can be unpacked. Time travel, alternate realities, paradoxes, a big magical sword, vampires and elder gods—it's a wonderful, tangled mess woven across five largely fantastic games. And now, unfortunately, a sixth terrible one.

I tried to get onboard with Legacy of Kain: Ascendance. Sure, a pixel-art sidescroller was never going to give the die-hard fans what they really wanted, but the series made some significant shifts between 1996 and 2003—jumping between and then uniting protagonists, mucking around with timelines, experimenting with mechanics and perspectives. So it's not a total deviation.

And at least it's not another competitive multiplayer spin-off.

That optimism seems a bit silly in hindsight. Ascendance is based on a poorly-received comic, The Dead Shall Rise, which retconned a significant portion of the series' story and introduced a new character, Elaleth, who also happens to be Raziel's sister.

"Mary Sue" has been bandied around a lot in reference to Elaleth, but that's often a sexist dog whistle—how dare a woman play an important role, and god forbid she go toe-to-toe with popular male characters. But Raziel was also once the new guy, and he rules, so the benefit of the doubt was duly given. Unfortunately, Elaleth is 100% a Mary Sue, and in a mere four hours she manages to undermine an entire universe.

Essentially, she's behind everything that led up to Soul Reaver, while also being a time-travelling Raziel knock-off—only a lot more powerful. The game, like the comic, establishes that she's the most important person in the universe, and in doing so it removes all agency from the other two protagonists and rewrites history.

This could have been thrilling. An 'everything you know is wrong' kinda deal. Instead, developer Bit Bot has contorted this long-running story with a complete lack of care just so it can jam a half-baked fanfic OC into it. Her motivation is a dead boyfriend and her power is seemingly limitless. She's an unkillable demigod who can talk anyone into doing what she wants—something established just off-hand, because whatever, why not give her mind control on top of everything else?

Ascendance is Elaleth's game, through and through. And Bit Bot's made a lot of effort to try and make us smitten with her—at least mechanically, because as a character she is dreadful. A poorly-defined anti-hero with a tiresome grudge, she's just a walking 'scorned woman' trope, which Bit Bot tackles without any nuance while offering zero insights.

While you'll get to play a fair amount of Raziel, both in human and vampire form, you'll spend even more time in Elaleth's shoes. And when you step out of them, you'll be desperate to go back. See, Elaleth's just so damn powerful. In the first level, you'll be dashing and flying and drinking blood constantly, slaughtering humans without a thought. None of her levels throw any real obstacles in your way, and in the unlikely event that you die, the checkpoints are absurdly generous.

She simply has no weaknesses or friction—aside from the HP-draining thirst for blood that all the vampiric characters have. I had to actually go back and check if Elaleth's sections featured this mechanic, though, because she gets to heal so frequently that it's hard to notice. This is not true of the other characters.

Going into the second level as human Raziel is brutal. The checkpoints are further apart, opportunities to heal are few and far between, you can't fly, and enemies hit you like a truck—while also frequently spawning behind you, off-screen. It's awful. The jump in difficulty is bewildering. And when you get to play as vamp Raziel, you'll face much stronger enemies and everything is on fire. It's not the fun kind of challenge—it's cheap and jarring.

While Raz does have tricks up his sleeve, I was never able to get into a flow. Combat is just so much smoother when you're playing his sister, and the game is too short and disjointed for things to click. Not that I'd want it to be longer. After just four hours I was utterly exhausted by the whole affair.

Oh yeah, and Kain is here. For one level. Yes, you get maybe 30 minutes of the big lad, culminating in one of Ascedance's terrible, single-mechanic boss fights. Being able to turn into mist or briefly transform into a swarm of bats is mildly diverting, but just like Raziel, he feels underpowered compared to Elaleth—despite his godlike status. 23 years of waiting, and this is what we get? I mean, c'mon. He does get some great scenery-chewing dialogue, though.

There's just so much to dislike about Ascendance. The pixel art is at best serviceable but often ugly. The completely different art style used for dialogue isn't any better, and for some reason every character is constantly bouncing and bobbing. On multiple occasions it switches to PS1-era 3D for no reason, aside from reminding us about the better, older games. There's also a flashback with static images that look like they belong in a children's cartoon. And at the end you get some slightly nicer animated cutscenes. It's all over the shop, speaking to the game's lack of a strong identity.

Meanwhile, the level design is uninspired, the enemy behaviour is sometimes so weird that it's hard to tell if they're just dumb or bugging out and, if it wasn't already clear, the story is just awful. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse at this point, so I will add that the dialogue is fine, albeit cheesy, even though it's limited by the weak story, and Simon Templeman once again knocks it out of the park as the voice of Kain—shame he's barely in the game.

It's such a disappointment that I'm worried this will kill any chance of us getting a meatier Legacy of Kain game—but at the same time, given how Ascendance sets up Elaleth's further adventures, it might be better if Kain and his pals go back into their coffins.

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