Legacy of Kain: Ascendance

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance isn’t that bad of a game. But it’s also likely not what fans were waiting for. Having three characters to play through twelve levels sounds good. But all three play similarly and they aren’t evenly featured—with Kain only playable once or twice. Legacy of Kain: Ascendace is okay. But longtime fans will be left still waiting for the next big game in the series.

Like its cast, Ascendance struggles awkwardly against the tides of a fate already written in a stone. It's saved by some incredibly evocative music, presentation, and a genuine love for its forebearers – even if it shows that love in clumsy and sometimes baffling ways.

After all this time, this should have felt like a return - something that rekindles what made the series special while confidently pushing it forward. Instead, Legacy of Kain: Ascendance feels like it’s caught between reverence and reinvention, never fully committing to either. For those of us who grew up with Legacy of Kain, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of disappointment. Not because it’s outright bad, but because it comes so close, so often, to reminding you just how special that world once was, without ever quite reaching it again.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance may not be the triumphant return that long-time fans have hoped for, but it is a confident step toward bringing the series back into the spotlight. Its moody pixel art, stellar voice performances, and thunderous industrial-orchestral soundtrack capture the gothic soul of Nosgoth remarkably well, even in a new 2D form. While the straightforward combat and brief runtime keep it from reaching the heights of the series’ best entries, the game still delivers an entertaining slice of dark fantasy that respects the lore and legacy that came before it.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a project defined by contradictions: ambitious in vision, inconsistent in execution. The lore is expanded with genuine generosity, the return of the original voice cast is a gift that certainly should not have been taken for granted, and the concept of exploring the era of the Imperial Kain through four distinct perspectives remains—from a narrative standpoint—the most compelling direction the series could have taken with a project of this scope. Fans of the mythology will find material well worth the wait. Yet the game built around it is imprecise where it ought to be surgical, sluggish where it strives to be dynamic, and visually uneven in ways that simply cannot be ignored. Those approaching the saga for the first time may find its standing relative to the genre's finest examples to be anything but favorable. Those returning—having grown up with Kain and Raziel and long dreamed of a new chapter in the saga—must first come to terms with the shift in genre, and there is no guarantee they will be willing to do so. Ascendance marks a step in the right direction; however, truly restoring Nosgoth to the greatness it deserves will require far more decisive strides. The future of the series remains entirely unwritten. This title merely hints at that potential, without fully proving it.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance captures the series’ gothic identity with a compelling narrative, strong performances, and striking pixel art, but struggles to maintain engagement due to repetitive combat and uneven gameplay design. While longtime fans will appreciate the expanded lore and character-driven story, the lack of depth in mechanics and inconsistent pacing make it feel like a missed opportunity to fully revive the franchise.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a chaotic mishmash of varying aesthetics and styles – a decent side-scroller wrapped up in a storyline that leaves a bad taste in my mouth and feels out of place within the series’ legacy. The enjoyable soundtrack and the final (?) return of Kain and Raziel aren’t enough for me to recommend this game.

More than twenty years after Defiance, Legacy of Kain: Ascendance proves to be a bitter disappointment. Instead of honoring the saga’s complex narrative background, Bit Bot Media’s title offers a clumsy retcon that resembles terrible fan fiction. In terms of gameplay, we are presented with a banal 2D platformer—devoid of any real challenge—that can be completed in under three hours, all while cycling through inconsistent art styles and an annoying soundtrack. This is decidedly not the title we deserved, especially after such a long wait.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance arrives at a delicate moment for the franchise. After years of silence broken by the positive reception of the remasters, fans expected a high-quality return worthy of the series — but what they received was a title that seems to underestimate the very legacy it carries in its name.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is the first new game in the franchise since 2003's Defiance. It really misses the mark on quite a few things, not the least of which is its story, which tries valiantly but just doesn't succeed in a meaningful way. In many ways, it's a step backwards and makes the franchise's most defining feature feel like a throwaway. It also just feels so bad to play, and if you were even a casual fan of Legacy of Kain back in the day, there's not much here I can really recommend outside of hearing Michael Bell and Simon Templeman again.

Ascendance is a nostalgia-filled title that is not even worthy of borrowing the titular name of the franchise, let alone be the title that the fans waited decades for: it’s an unredeemable abomination.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a direct adaptation of the Dead Shall Rise comic book which was received poorly by fans and non-fans alike. The whole game retcons the complete masterpiece that was the Legacy of Kain series and renders all choices Raziel and Kain made meaningless. The gameplay is atrocious and boring and the AI fluctuates from stupid to input reading levels. I was longing for a new Legacy of Kain game, but instead we got a bad adaptation of an even worse comic book. Crystal Dynamics should be ashamed of themselves since they knew how poorly TDSR was received. Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call that you cannot mess with the classics and reinvent the story just because you can.

There’s very little to redeem Legacy of Kain: Ascendance other than the fact that it’s short.