Underworld Ascendant promises an interactive world with unique factions, meaningful character creation, and flowing combat in the same universe as the rest of the Ultima series; and the setting is the Underworld, a series of massive underground caves and caverns populated by all manner of creature and intelligent life. The developers have made the setting so important that they even call it a character. This setting is not just the place which your story takes place; it grows and changes as you make decisions. For example you decide to flood a cavern so a friendly faction called the shamblers can expand their territory. Now you have to deal with more water based monsters and the repercussions of your actions when dealing with other factions like dwarves and dark elves. By this you can see that all your choices change the environment unlike other games where you could save an entire country from dragons and not even change the color of the leaves.
As mentioned before there is a faction of living and talking fungus, as well as frontier dwarves, and dark elves. These unique factions are all in competition for the caves that Underworld Ascendant takes place in and they all have legitimate claims to the land; even if they’re not always the most truthful. For instance a Shambler might say he wants you to take back some land for them because it is holy, but when you take it back you realize it was just so they could expand their territory and that he was lying to you. The same goes for the dwarves and the dark elves. Each faction and each character will be completely dynamic based off of past events and knowledge, which adds a lot to the game.
And what is a good RPG if you can’t create an amazing character? In Underworld Ascendant you get to choose from one of the 3 main classes of mage, fighter, and rogue but you can mix and match your character to fit your play style. You also gain perks form helping factions. This means a mage for one faction will be significantly different from a mage of another faction and past that they can both mix and patch skills between classes thus making them even more unique.
Lastly a good RPG must have good combat. Sure, you can run right into combat in Underworld Ascendant, but be careful because timing is everything so one second too slow or too fast means you could end up a sea monster’s lunch. You can also pick up powerful runes and combine them for interesting effects.
Underworld Ascendant just hit its Kickstarter goal, which means now is the time to jump in if you want to get some backer reward. You can learn more about the game, and it’s offering of loot, on it’s Kickstarter campaign page.
