Overview
Ascent Rivals is a science-fiction racing game in which you fly an armed ship through hostile industrial circuits and shoot at the rivals trying to pass you. A match runs as a series of heats rather than one lap-counting sprint: finish on the podium, or fight your way into a final zone before the clock runs out. It suits players who want a racer where combat and nerve matter as much as a clean line.
The game comes from GENUN Games, a small independent studio in Seattle that has worked on it full time for years12. Now in beta, Ascent Rivals hands out access through a request form, and its own website doubles as the competitive layer, holding course records, pilot and team profiles, and sponsor-backed tournament seasons345. The studio has approached Cardano through Project Catalyst, the ecosystem's community grant program, where it proposed paying tournament prizes out on-chain, opening team rosters to token holders, and creating wallets behind an ordinary Steam or console login — proposals that were not approved and did not ship2. Its backend supplier, AccelByte, has described its own software as connecting the game to Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and Cardano, though no such integration is present in the playable build1.
Key Features
- Shooting pays for speed. Taking out a rival earns a currency called ARC, which you spend between heats on ship and weapon upgrades, so a rough lap can be answered with a better ship6.
- A second chance after the podium. Once the leading pilots cross the line, an Ascension Zone opens and everyone still racing gets seconds to fight their way into it, which turns the closing moments into a brawl instead of a procession6.
- Steer each engine separately. Handling is split across the ship's two engines rather than one steering input, and GameGrin's showcase write-up singles that control scheme out as the hard part to master7.
- Eight named worlds, not generic tracks. Courses run from an easy shoreline circuit to a hard mountain pass and mining depots, each carrying its own difficulty rating and lap count3.
- A tournament season that lives on the website. Gauntlets, time trials, and Circuit Points are scheduled and scored on the site itself, with pilot and team pages recording who won what4.
What to Expect
Entry runs through a request form rather than a download button. The Steam listing carries the trailer, screenshots, and feature rundown6. Everything else on the Ascent Rivals site is open to browse without an account.
The public side of the site is unusually deep for an indie racer. Courses come with lap counts and difficulty ratings3, and each gauntlet lists its format, time window, and server region4. An events archive records past seasons run under partner branding from Shelby, Saleen, and DirtFish5. The about page introduces the team by name and lists the convention floors the game has appeared on, including PAX and DreamHack8.
The blockchain features the studio has described sit inside grant proposals rather than the shipped build, and the game, the store page, and the studio site each present a combat racer2.
