oOo: Ascension (Xbox One) Review

oOo: Ascension has an easy to grasp main idea. Each level takes place on a sphere with a set path to the main goal, and you have to navigate various types of obstacles to get there, such as sawblades, lasers, and so on. Your move-set is extremely limited, though; there's no jumping or anything like that, just precise movement with the ability to speed up and slow down as you please.

Despite the simplistic move-set, there's a healthy amount of mechanics present in each world. The first two worlds or so are a bit dull, but the amount of variety gets better from there. That said, though, many of the game's gimmicks do unfortunately fall back on making players squeeze through a tight passage with near pixel perfect precision. This is something that doesn't exactly have much of a high skill ceiling, either, so it can get repetitive rather fast.

The game also has an issue where it feels like it can't decide what it wants to accomplish. Sometimes it has levels that are based on pure precision and nothing else, while other times it has levels requiring no precision and are instead almost entirely puzzle-based. There's one especially miserable stage, for instance, that has you going through a drawn out maze without any obstacles.

The best levels in oOo: Ascension tend to combine both puzzle and precision elements in clever ways. One mission, for example, has a bunch of timed switches that unlock more timed switches, and eventually it unlocks the goal when activating the last one. This stage requires optimisation and planning out of the route to get to all the switches in time, while still requiring a certain degree of precision since there is a need to avoid getting stuck by moving over panels that slow you down. There are some other levels that exhibit this much creativity, but most of them don't gel well enough to reach that point.

However, even with all that said, there's still a good amount of enjoyment to be had from blasting through courses and feeling great while doing so. Certain levels have a satisfying kinetic flow to them, and make you want to push forward to see what the next world has to offer. The game is definitely tough, but it's unlikely that anyone will be stuck on a single level long enough to the point where it just becomes frustrating, which is helped by how short each course is.

In fact, each level has an extra challenge requiring you to beat the stage within a certain time, but in the majority of instances, just beating the stage for the first time will result in a time that's more than good enough to qualify for the optional objective. These optional tasks are extremely lenient, and you will likely complete most of them without even trying. There's sadly no online leaderboard to be found, so there's little incentive to go back and get the best times possible.