It's a lot of trying to figure things out.

All the stuff you need is there, however, making sense of the code is difficult.  A strong experience is what helps here.  Strong knowledge in both high and low level languages are essential, as well as the compilation process (conversion from high level to low level).  This assists in trying to reconstruct the high level code from the low level code you have.

You can think of it similar to hex editing.  You have a bunch of data, but trying to make sense of it requires some thought (assuming you're not just trying to replace values).


My ASM knowledge is pretty bad, and I think I would take ages to interpret any ASM code (without comments).