I've been running a ~35 session campaign for my group since the PDF was released to backers ~9 months ago. Ascendant quickly became one of my top 3 RPGs I've ever played or run due to the extremely deep character building system and the simple mechanics that yield realistic outcomes. I kept a 1 page printout of a cheat sheet with the CHART, damage values, and several of the benchmark tables (speed, distance, weight, time) from the front of the book, so that I didn't have to reference the simple things at the table; it was basically a homemade pared down version of what the Gamemaster Screen is. Armed with the cheat sheet, I only had to reference the book during play to double-check certain powers. The game plays fast at the table and even the toughest fights play out quickly compared to 5th ed, PF 1e, or 3.5. Outside of combat, I love how this game makes the players feel awesome in their areas of competency but the characters tend to be narrow enough in their expertise that most or all of the players have something cool to do each session. ("You're questioning the witness with 13 SP of Interrogation? No need to roll; she tells you that...")

Character creation was difficult to 2 of my 5 players, however 2 of the other players ended making multiple characters for fun. I think gamemasters should volunteer to create (or help with creating) the characters based on a theme that the players suggest. Players who enjoy crunchier games or are into superheroes will have a blast building characters. You can stat out pretty much anything in this game, in case you want your characters to confront some 5th edition D&D efreet (we did!), go up against some cyberware-sporting street samurai (alas, not yet), or evacuate civilians while the Power Rangers duke it out with a kaiju above their heads (maybe next campaign, heh).

The mechanical balance of the game is important to get right. In my experience it's easy to come up with scenarios that characters can trivialize: my friend ran a session featuring a booby-trapped cruise ship with hostages, 30 armed pirates (but no enemy Ascendants), and an armed helicopter. My speedster was able to run through the whole ship and knock out all 30 pirates as his turn, after some hacking had given our team the complete deck plans and another character was able to interrogate one of the pirates to determine exactly what we were up against. This was, however, predictable since 30 pirates have a Challenge Rating of 30 and our team had a Challenge Rating of 180. The gamemastering chapter lays out exactly how to build a challenging, but possible, Issues for the players to overcome, but making a just-right session is something that the GM has to get a handle on. It's no different than encounter balancing in the d20 games, when you get down to it, but it's important to get right or either some of the players won't have enough to do ("oh we already won?") or, on the other extreme, they'll find themselves in a situation where the best outcome is escaping with their lives.

I'd recommend this to anyone who likes superheroes or "who would win" hypotheticals. Anyone who is a simulationist gamer will also be delighted by the system (that's me). I suspect that the game could work well for groups who are more into stories and less into crunch too, as long as the GM can help build characters and isn't afraid of figuring out the difficulty balance I wrote about in the last section. As far as the players are concerned the game is simple: look up your AV (very few conditional modifiers to futz with!), GM gives you the DV, decide how many of your Hero Points to spend, roll a d100 and look at the CHART.