Legacy of Kain: Ascendance PC review — Sometimes dead is better

The Legacy of Kain fandom should be incredibly happy right now. The franchise has been resurrected after over 20 years, we got a new comic, and now we have a new game. Of course, the fan reaction to that comic has been mostly negative, and the fact that the new game, Legacy of Kain: Ascendance, is tied to it didn’t inspire much confidence either. It’s honestly not enough to say it’s linked to it either, as the game is really an adaptation of the comic widely derided by the fanbase. Regardless of any of that, this is a subpar 2D platformer with uninspired gameplay, mostly poor level design, and its story is mainly just the comic we’ve already read.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance mostly focuses on the story of Elaleth, Raziel’s newly retconned sister, who just happens to be the driving force behind many of the events of the Soul Reaver games. Much of the dialogue here is lifted wholesale from the comic, and it simply isn’t very good. Elaleth’s very existence is questionable, as she does indeed feel like a fanfic insert with hardly any actual personality. Michael Bell and Simon Templeman return as Raziel and Kain, which is great to hear, but they can’t really elevate this material above the level of glorified fanfiction.

The game is mostly presented via pixel art, but is fully voiced. The pixel art for the characters is okay, but it is pretty workmanlike overall. The level backgrounds themselves fare far worse, as they lack personality and are far too dark. There are a couple of 3D sections that use pixelated visuals to attempt to hearken back to the original Soul Reaver, but these are weird and feel out of place. Toward the end of Legacy of Kain: Ascendance, some anime-inspired cutscenes that look and feel totally unlike the rest of the game show up, but all of this makes things seem unfocused and scattershot. Still, the voice acting is good at least, even if it’s impossible to ignore how incredibly tired Michael Bell sounds after all these years.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is divided into 12 chapters that cover events from the comic, many of which show scenes taking place during the first couple of Soul Reaver games from a different perspective. There are really three playable characters: Elaleth, Raziel, and Kain. Raziel is playable in both his human and vampire forms as well, which can arguably mean there are four playable characters. Each chapter, however, doesn’t feature gameplay. Some are really mostly story, such as the two 3D chapters, so there really aren’t many levels in the game at all.

When there is gameplay, Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a very underwhelming 2D action platformer. Your goal is usually just to make it all the way to the right by fighting enemies and platforming, but the controls feel too loose and somewhat unresponsive, and the level design is poor. Almost all of these levels are incredibly dark and feature nondescript rocky paths to walk on. They have little to no sense of place and feel like a confusing mess of assets placed by amateurs. I truly haven’t seen 2D level design this lacking since lazy licensed games on the Super Nintendo.

All of the game’s characters can move, jump, slash their sword a single time, parry, and dodge. The vampires can also do a dive attack and drink the blood of defeated foes, while winged characters can fly by tapping the jump button in mid-air. Kain can even use his bat form to fly to specific objects, plus his dodge turns him into mist, but the only difference between his dodge and others is that it can be used to bypass closed gates. Sword combat sees you mashing the attack button to land single hits since there aren’t combos. Performing a parry opens the enemy up to a strong counter-attack, but the parry is incredibly wonky, and I didn’t find it reliable at all to use.

The levels are thus broken up into poorly designed combat encounters that oftentimes just feel boring or spammy, and some very mediocre platforming. It can be hard to see where you’re going, and the signposting simply isn’t very good. There is exploration to be had, however, which will net you mostly boring pieces of lore or fragments to increase all of the characters’ health and stamina gauges. I didn’t find enough to get even a full increase across the whole game, not that it mattered on the normal difficulty. Searching for secrets in these monotonous, overly dark levels is simply not enjoyable.

The two 3D chapters feel so weirdly shoehorned into Legacy of Kain: Ascendance. The first sees Ariel quizzing you on the names of each balance pillar, which is utterly pointless and adds nothing of value (in addition to completely wasting Anna Gunn.) The other one sees you doing a brief quick-time event as Kain. The latter is kind of cool solely due to the events of the scene itself, but the 3D stuff is all superfluous. It almost seems like pandering to try to appease the fans who are almost certain to mostly hate everything about this.

The worst part of the game is the second level, which has you play as human Raziel. He can’t heal by drinking the blood of his enemies, but it’s as if the devs forgot to balance around this. This level has a couple of unique vampire enemies that don’t appear elsewhere and is just an absolute, tedious bore. Human Raziel is also missing the other characters’ dive attacks, which is great to mitigate the fact that enemies are usually way too close together to adequately fight within the awkward level design. This is the hardest level in the game, and nothing else comes close, which is weird since it’s so early on.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance really only takes a few hours to play, and you can redo any of the game’s chapters at any time from the menu. Weirdly, you can’t load up a mid-chapter save, so if you quit out before the chapter’s done, you’ll have to replay it from the beginning. I found this out by having to restart a chapter with several minutes of cutscenes at the start, only to notice that they couldn’t be skipped. This is all laughable for a game released this year, but it’s not surprising considering the state of this game.

Despite being a big fan of the series, there is little about Legacy of Kain: Ascendance that doesn’t feel like a lazy, uninspired cash grab. It’s short, it’s ugly, it has a bad story, the level design is poor, and the gameplay is pedestrian and unsatisfying. As nice as it is to hear the actors return to their iconic roles, they simply aren’t enough to even come close to saving such a lazy attempt at resurrecting the series. It truly would have been better for it to have stayed dead, as seeing the corpse of a beloved franchise defiled to make a quick buck isn’t going to be much fun for anyone.

More from Legacy of Kain:

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