A long awaited return, but not the one we wanted: Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a 2D prequel that doesn’t quite get it right.
After more than 20 years following the release of the previous main game in the series, Legacy of Kain is finally back with a new chapter, although it’s a smaller and different from what fans would have expected.
Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a 2D platform side-scroller in pixel art, with straightforward combat gameplay: you can either attack or parry and counterattack with the right timing.
Even though there may be a few differences in movement and special attacks needed to finish off your opponents depending on the chapter you’re playing, the gameplay loop is extremely simple and the real challenge may come from the amount of enemies and hazards you’ll encounter in each stage, not a real difficulty.
That is a real shame because you get to control 3 different characters in this game (for the most part you’ll play as the newcomer Elaleth and as Raziel, but there’s also a short section with Kain) but they all feel mostly the same, for better or worse.
It doesn’t help that Ascendance never feels good to play: the gameplay while simple is also clunky, with the enemy AI being really bad and certain platform sections, particularly towards the end, that are just suddenly frustrating and unbalanced.
The lack of balance is particularly evident right from the get-go: every character gets a means to regenerate health, except the human version of Raziel which you’ll be stuck with during the early part of the game.
To compensate this, the game gives you the ability to throw fire upon your enemies, even though that only serves to kill them for good and will just make trying to skip as many of them as possible the best strategy, hoping to find the nearest checkpoint and avoid the barrage of enemies coming to get you.
Since the gameplay is almost never fun — at least Kain feels powerful enough to compensate for what you had to endure to get that far — what we’re stuck with is a game that basically only exists to add lore that may eventually be expanded upon in a proper sequel or a new triple-A chapter of the series.
Though, since Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a prequel, the only real addition is that we get to learn about Elaleth, Raziel’s sister, and experience certain story events in detail that fans only heard about on the sidelines of previous games.
I can certainly appreciate that they also brought back the original voice actors to make sure the experience remained as authentic as the previous games, but unfortunately they’re not at their best. A lot of times it feels like they’re just reading through their lines without putting too much effort, which I assume means there wasn’t a proper voice direction for the cast.
Final Thoughts
It pains me to admit this, but Ascendance seems to fail in almost every way and is overall a very forgettable game and even the expanded lore doesn’t feel like it’s enough to justify a purchase, as it’s a really short game as well — I managed to finish the entire thing in about 4 hours.
If there’s one real saving grace, is that the soundtrack is actually really good. There are some hidden musical gems that you’ll be able to appreciate during your playthrough.
It’s just a shame that the rest of the game didn’t get the same level of care and quality and ends up as a mediocre product as a result.
Maybe the next game will get it right, assuming we don’t have to wait 20 more years.
A Nintendo Switch copy of Legacy of Kain: Ascendance was provided by Crystal Dynamics. We captured the screenshots through backwards compatibility on Nintendo Switch 2 in docked mode.