Ascension: not enough hell Hounds...

...too many frakking Space Monkeys!

And its worse than we thought. Space Monkeys steal your perks. This is extremely annoying and extremely costly. We thought that the took our perks by attacking us. Turns out this is not the case. From the Call of Duty Wiki:

Space Monkeys are new enemies that appear in the map Ascension, where they steal the players' perks in the form of attacking Perk-a-Cola machines. They replace the Hellhounds on this map. The space monkeys will attack a perk machine until the player loses his/her perk.

So now we have to protect the Perk-a-Cola machines in order to keep our perks. Did I mention that there are two new Perk-a-Cola machines in this map? Did I mention there is still only four players in this mode? Did I mention that this is the largest Zombie Map ever and the Perk-a-Cola machines are spread out all over the place? Admittedly Double Tap Root Beer is now gone, replaced by PhD Flopper (drop a small nuke when diving) and Stamin-Up (increased movement speed – did I mention its a large map?).

I officially miss Hell Hounds.

And, worse, we have yet to find our equivalent to the Catwalk of Hope and Love.

So we die, a lot, without perks, without ammo, without cash and without any friends as none of the rest of us will listen to any of the others. In fact, Richtofen's "I hate you Dempsey" was straight out of the Stormblade/Blackwalt playbook.

I realize this means that I will have to continue to play Zombie Mode with people I now hate but if I have to, I have to.

Ascension is a good Zombie Mode. The map is huge with stairwells all over the place and doors that continue opening into area after area after area. It took us a lot of playing to uncover all of the map and I am still not sure we got it all.

There are new drop bonuses, new perks, new secondary grenades and new weapons. And new zombie designs and tactics. Yes, Zombies now fake dying and then popup to attack you after you think you killed them. They also do an odd somersault move which avoids your fire and lets them get closer.

The most interesting thing was the Lunar Lander which you can call to three outlying launch pads and fly back to the central Launch area. After you fly all three routes the main rocket on the map can be launched. Space Monkeys do not occur until after you launch the rocker. Unfortunately, the launch doors also don't open and you have no access to the Pack-a-Punch upgrade machine until afterward.

Things about ascension:

• Did I mention the map was huge?
• two new perks
• everything is in Black & White until you turn the power on
• Lunar landers as escape routes
• Death Machine as a power up bonus
• all new quotes for the four characters
• the Gersch_Device –"creates a small singularity event sucking any nearby zombies in"
• There are 5 perks but a player can only have 4 at a time

That's all for now, I have to go find some people I hate to kill Zombies with...