There's a free open beta for 'adaption shooter' Ascendant on Steam this weekend

YouTube

There are many ways to FPS: the tried-and-true squad battles of Counter-Strike 2, the endless quests for chicken dinners in Fortnite, the old-school deathmatches in Quake. This is a new one to me: the developers of ASCENDANT.COM (yeah, that's what they're calling it) are claiming that it's the world's first "adaption shooter."

So what is an adaption shooter? Well, apparently it's a 3v3v3v3 battle on a map that changes every time you play it, where you compete to extract "biocores" and shoot anything that moves. Sounds like an extraction shooter, with some twists. You can try it out this weekend during an open beta on Steam. Here's when you can play:

August 3: Open Beta begins at 7:00am PDT / 10:00am EDT / 3:00PM BST
August 4: Open Beta ends at 8:59pm PDT / 11:59pm EDT / 4:59am BST

Power is an in-game resource that can be found across the map in little canisters or blown out of poor, innocent monsters scattered around like little loot piñatas. Use it to buy new weapons, open locked doors, or trigger health regen or shield boosts for your team. Any Power you gather is usable by your teammates once you check in with a shop, so you don't have to worry about your rando squaddie hogging all the juice.

Complicating matters are all manner of obstacles. Giant radiation-spewing turtle creatures, a map that changes every time you drop in, environmental hazards and the other three squads will all seek to prevent you from a smooth retrieval. If you do manage to escape with a biocore, however, sweet loot awaits.

The trailer on the website shows all kinds of good stuff: an SMG that shoots toxic ooze, a sniper rifle that drops cluster bombs on its target, and a plasma rifle that lights up a whole area with a firestorm all stood out. Add this to what looks like a bunch of vehicles and other random methods of destruction like airstrikes and you might have something fun—or at least worth trying out this weekend.

Apparently the lore of the world involves a cryogenic freeze where everyone's been on ice since the '80s, so everything is hairspray, neon, and glam rock. Perhaps the celestial avatar of David Bowie will come down and bless me with a rocket launcher.

Russ has been playing PC games since the top of the line graphics were in ASCII and has been obsessed with them just about as long. After a coordinated influence campaign to bamboozle his parents into getting a high speed internet connection to play EverQuest, his fate was well and truly sealed. When he's not writing about videogames, he's teaching karate, cooking an overly complicated dish, or attempting to raise his daughter with a well rounded classical education (Civilization, Doom, and Baldur's Gate, of course). He's probably mapping in Path of Exile right now.