Firstly and most importantly, let's deal with the actual gameplay. Ascendant plays great - it's fast, smooth, and can handle plenty of characters without getting bogged down in the details. It uses a d100 system (with a very few cases where other dice are used), and charts and tables rather than directly rolling for damage. Character design is extremely flexible, and not too difficult to master - although you will want to make use of spreadsheet software rather than doing it by hand.

When it comes to the design of the PDF... it's beautiful. The artwork (and there's a lot of it) is first rate, and the layout is very clean, with everything nicely colour-coded and easy to read. Not quite sure how so much information was squeezed into so few pages (I mean, yes it's 500 pages, but it feels like it should be a lot more), but at any rate, it's impressive.

All in all, 10/10 for both mechanics and presentation.