YMMV / The Ascent

• Esoteric Happy Ending: While you save your own life and manage to earn your freedom, most of the rest of what you do merely serves (as nogHead points out) to protect the profits of a corporation. The catastrophe you avert at the end would have been localized, since the experiment has been tried and failed repeatedly before, so ultimately all you did was save some money, resources, and equipment for yCorp and the remnants of the Ascent Group.
• Event-Obscuring Camera: That one long narrow corridor in the Cosmodrome, where the camera shifts into Side View to hide how underdeveloped the entire area is. Considering that aiming is aligned to the ground plane, trying to shoot the enemies that unavoidably appear in this area suddenly gets much harder. In other locations, the camera sometimes gets obscured by bits of level geometry, even to the extent of the entire screen going black due to walls going right in front of the camera.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Life Transfer augmentation marks every enemy in a given area and heals you whenever you damage a marked enemy. Combine that with a fast-hitting weapon like a minigun and you can heal yourself faster than enemies can damage you.
  • The spider drones you get after beating the Megarachnid have a cooldown that lasts precisely as long as they stick around, plus an energy cost of precisely the amount you'll regenerate in that time. This means you can keep them deployed all the time and, with high enough Cybernetics, they will swarm and obliterate or severely weaken many enemies without you having to do anything at all.
  • The Pocket Mech (after a patch significantly buffed it) makes you nearly invulnerable while you're inside it, reducing all damage you take to Scratch Damage while giving you an extremely powerful weapon. What's more, said weapon fires so rapidly that with sufficient Tactical Sense it will fully recover your tactical charge, allowing you to keep it deployed constantly in combat.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The game has numerous unpopular mechanics, but the most frequently mentioned ones are the obtuse map, the frustrating fast-travel system, and the ill-conceived and illogical Beef Gates everywhere.
• That One Boss: The Megarachnid is a major Difficulty Spike. After mostly organic enemies, it's a robot, meaning you'll probably have to switch up to a different weapon type if you want to do decent damage against it. It's constantly deploying little spider robots against you and its primary attack is a flamethrower with a surprising amount of range. Oh, and if you decide to head back to the Warrens to grind up money and experience for better weapons and stats? The Megarachnid is deep in the bowels of deepStink; you can take the taxi out, but getting back to the boss fight is a dull slog that can take ten minutes, fighting off waves of ferals.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Stackmaster Poone is generally a far more interesting character and questgiver than Kira, since he's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who is genuinely trying to find a way for everyone to survive and to eventually secure their independence. Once Kira takes over he more or less vanishes from the plot; and most of the quests following that amount to "do this because yCorp tells you to, in order to secure yCorp's profits." As nogHead points out, even the endgame revelation doesn't actually change this.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The game's Hollywood Hacking is a frequent target of criticism because of its simplicity - you literally press one button and either succeed or don't, depending solely on your cyberdeck level. Given how important interacting with the digital domain is in the cyberpunk genre, this is generally considered a missed opportunity.
  • The bounty system. Instead of picking up targets from a bounty board and tracking them down, bounties are essentially just Elite Mooks that you randomly run into while traveling the game world. They have no personality, no backstory, no reason given why there's a bounty on their head other than some generic "they've been naughty". And to add insult to injury, despite being internally divided into low-ranking and high-ranking bounties, they all pay out the same amount of cash (1,000 ucreds each), with their rank only being mentioned by your Imp and the bartender when you hand in the bounty.