Once in a blue moon, a game will come out of nowhere and shock you.
You start playing it without much expectation or anticipation, but by the time you’re
done with it you’re left in awe of what was accomplished.
You search and search for reasons, an explanation of why this experience was so engrossing.
Maybe it’s going to take everyone by surprise, maybe it’ll be ignored by the larger gaming
media, or maybe, just maybe, it really is that good and all of your feelings are justified.
This feeling of unjustified and inexplicable quality is one that is hard to ignore.
And it’s a feeling that’s all over The Surge 2.
Without a doubt it is one of the most surprisingly good games I’ve played in a long time.
The sci-fi action RPG is expansive, polished, and engrossing every step of the way.
It follows in the footsteps of the original Surge, and other titles that it’s constantly
compared to, namely Dark Souls and Bloodborne.
The Dark Souls comparison is so troglodytic at this point that this will be the final
mention of it in this video.
I’m going to evaluate this game on its merits not on whether or not it satiates my From
Software fetish.
Yes, I’m throwing shade a the big reviewers who will no doubt rant endlessly about the
comparison.
“YOU ARE SO BRAVE.”
Regardless, what I can say is that this game scratches that itch better than any game released
in the last 2 years and it places the developer, Deck13 in the same field of developers, as
far as I’m concerned.
Now, don’t worry, I’m going to be explaining all of this in the coming minutes.
I will be showing footage and discussing the first boss in the game to demonstrate some
points about combat.
I will let you know when this is about to happen and will include a timestamp of where
to skip to if you don’t want to know about it.
Just a heads up.
But I don’t think it’ll ruin the boss fight for you, it just will demonstrate the
basics of the combat system in action.
Nonetheless I will be going into why this game is so good in this video, and I want
to thank Focus Home Interactive for sending over the review code over week before the
game’s launch.
That’s pretty rare and I think it deserves praise.
There are still a couple of issues with the game, but it is no doubt worth your time.
At the start of the game you’re greeted with a character creation section.
This is always a fun little thing but it’s important to note that it really doesn’t
matter what your character looks like as you’re going to be covered up with armor within the
first 30 minutes, but still, it’s a nice touch.
Beards and hair are terrible but it’s ok because once again, you’re not going to
see them for 99% of the game.
You explore a hospital tutorial area and shortly after this you find an exo-suit and you allocate
3 basic stats.
Health, Stamina, and battery efficiency.
Health increases your total pool of HP.
Stamina, your usable energy.
And battery efficiency changes the rate at which you build your battery charges in addition
to increasing the total effectiveness of injectables that use battery charges such as healing and
damage buffs, in other words, making them more efficient.
1- 16.25 Furthermore, you can reassign these points
at any time for a small charge, making it easy to change your build if you’re having
trouble with one boss’ specific specialties.
If they hit like a truck and keep one shot-ing you, you can grind for some upgrades, or you
can re allocate your already collected points to weight into your health more.
But this isn’t where The Surge 2’s customization stops.
With a plethora of weapons and armor sets, the player can play in almost any style they
want, even changing their load outs on the fly so that you can take on different enemies
in the most efficient way possible.
But we’ll discuss this more in a moment.
The sound design is stellar, and graphically the game is nothing to scoff at.
The soundtrack felt a bit odd at times, but for the most part fits with the theme and
works.
It’s like they say, if you didn’t notice it, it probably was doing its job.
Performance pretty clean across the board, with only a couple of areas consistently causing
frame dips, although Deck 13 has said that these should be vastly improved on launch
day.
I played on an Xbox One X so I can’t speak to the level of customization or performance
on PC, but on Xbox the game runs very well and I didn’t encounter any notable glitches
or problems.
There is a story in the game, and it’s actually pretty interesting, but the developers know
that that’s not why people are playing, and so they keep most of the exposition relegated
to sound recordings and world-based story telling.
But, as I said, the star is the combat.
To begin, the original Surge’s combat focused on targeting body parts with attacks and learning
how to correctly deflect attacks from opponents.
In the Surge 2 this is taken to another level.
All of the animations, response times, and hitboxes are vastly improved over the previous
game.
The key to the Surge 2’s combat is a directional parry system which requires the player to
not just block at the right time but also indicate the direction from which the attack
is coming, whether it’s a swing from the left, right, overhead or a scooping sweep
attack.
Furthermore, enemies can have different tolerances for these parries, so for some enemies one
parry will stagger them allowing you to deal damage, whereas others require two or three
consecutive parries to be staggered.
This keeps the mechanic engaging as it doesn’t become obsolete as a gameplay mechanism as
the player get’s better at it the more they play.
You also have a drone on your back which you can swap out with different abilities to help
in different situations.
Whether it’s an EMP blast or a sniper rifle strapped to your back, it can come in handy
more than you’d think, especially in late game boss fights who have some weaknesses
to certain drones.
The highlight of the combat is the bosses.
Each of these encourage different strategies meant to train the player in a new approach.
This means that the first few times you go against a boss, you’ll suck and blow
it repeatedly.
It won’t make sense and will seem needlessly difficult.
But once you sit back, think of the best way to deal with the bugger, you’ll find yourself
taking them on in very tactical ways.
Some are weak to poison, others to nanite damage, and others to fire.
Each are different and require unique approaches.
Now, The Surge 2’s tactical customization comes in the form of different weapon and
armor effects.
One suit will offer individual component bonuses in the form of buffs against certain elemental
damage, and they’ll also offer set bonuses, encouraging the player to search for the schematics
for every suit style they like.
You collect these schematics by engaging with enemies and targeting specific body parts,
such as the arms, legs, torso, or head.
Successfully breaking each of these will allow you to collect the schematic for that body
part matching the type of armor worn by said enemy.
This means that if you want a high level enemy’s armor set, you’ll need to take them on once
for the arms, once for the legs, once for the torso, and once for the head schematics.
Furthermore, this also works for collecting weapons.
See an enemy with a cool sword?
Just target the arm holding it and there’s a chance they’ll drop the weapon and or
the arm schematic as well.
But it’s important to know that you won’t always deal your damage to that body part
you’re targeting, sometimes you’ll deal it to the legs when you’re aiming for the
head and vice versa.
This means that you have to actually think of the attack you’re doing and whether it
will hit the target area, whether you’re using one of the game’s two main attacks,
vertical and horizontal.
This can be changed with certain implants, which act as specific skills and abilities
you can load out with.
For instance, some implants will change the amount of damage you deal, other will increase
your defense, one will indicate the direction of the attack that is incoming making it far
easier to parry (I consider this implant a must at all times), and another called the
Physical Aggression Redirector.
This implant costs 3 power consumption, a stat that increases every time you level up
using scrap you collect in the world, and on it’s lowest level it ensures that all
damage applies to the targeted body part, and if damage hits another body part as a
result of a poorly targeted swing, it’s efficacy will be decreased by 75%.
All of these things have their own special uses and can be upgraded throughout the game.
I found a set of Armor I liked early , and so I just made sure to continue upgrading
it as I went through the game.
I would also discover new armor sets I liked, and I’d craft those out, though it’s important
to say that often these started at much lower levels and strengths than the armor I was
already using, so if I wanted to change to a new suit, I needed to spend a lot of scrap
and materials to upgrade it to the point where it made sense to use it.
Higher level gear in the late game helps with this, but it was an issue I came across a
few times.
To see all of this in action, let’s look at the first boss fight.
As I said, this is your warning and a time stamp will appear on screen at this time if
you don’t want to see details on this fight.
[TIME STAMPS] This guy is named Little Johnny, you fight
him in Port Nixon in the first few hours of the game.
There’s a tutorial boss before this about 10 minutes in, but I don’t count him as
an actual boss.
Little Johnny is in a giant robot crab body and you fight him in a very large arena.
The game doesn’t tell how to take him down, so you have to start experimenting.
Once locking on and trying to target specific body parts, you’ll see that you can target
each of his legs and two small tanks under the main body of the machine.
Attacking these points will eventually break them showing a container breaking underneath
what initially appeared to be his health bar.
Turns out this represents a coolant system for the machine.
As you break each of the weak points, you’ll increase the temperature of the crab thing…
There’s no specified order in which you’re supposed to do this.
The developers recommended taking on the tanks underneath the main body first likely because
these do the most “damage” to him.
The thing is, enemies in the Surge 2 will change how they fight based on the damage
you’ve dealt unto them.
If you target the tanks first instead of the legs, Little Johnny become highly erratic
and protects his legs, flailing them around the arena making the last 3 weak points very
difficult to hit.
And so, at this point I decided to take the legs down first and focus on the body last,
I also equipped that implant I referred to earlier that dealt all damage to the targeted
body part.
Out in the world this implant wasn’t very useful as it tended to make defeating enemies
take longer, but for this boss with specific weak points, it was the hidden key.
Once I did all of this, and took out his legs, he became much less mobile and I was able
to finish his body tanks off without much trouble, as he just cycled through a few basic
attacks since his legs were broken.
TIME STAMP And this is what the Surge 2 does so well.
It poses a problem to the player and gives them the tools to deal with it, but it’s
up to the player to creatively over come the challenges in whatever way they see fit.
Enemy variety is very high, at least in terms of weapon and armor load outs, and I rarely
felt as though I was running through a copy and pasted area.
Furthermore, bosses are also varied with only a few recycling some of the same ideas.
The only big problem with the combat is that taking on multiple enemies is still terrible.
You can unlock the camera, but usually once you deal damage to an enemy, the camera will
lock on to them and focus on that body part.
I didn’t notice this on bosses, but I did on smaller enemies out in the world.
This means you’re constantly fighting with the lock on system when you’re surrounded
by more than one enemy.
I get that it’s trying to be helpful, but I wish it would just leave the lock on to
the player.
Who knows though, this may be patched out by launch, I’m not sure.
All I know is that it caused a few frustrating deaths.
One of the other ways that the game encourages player exploration and experimentation is
in the world itself.
The level design is so intricate it’s honestly hard to explain or quantify.
The amount of detail, interwoven paths, and secret hidden passages is frankly astounding
and makes exploring every level a joy.
From minute to minute you never know how one path is going to circle back and reconnect
to the main hub.
By the time you take down a level’s boss, you’ll be so familiar with all of the secret
passageways in the level you’ll feel as though you’ve conquered not just the boss,
but the very area itself.
My one issue with level design like this however, is that it can often leave the player unsure
of where they’re supposed to go.
The game is littered with maps and directional hints, but there were still a few times where
I wasn’t sure where I should go.
Worsening this, is the fact that there’s a tool known as the force hook which allows
you to traverse across large areas quickly.
Multiple times I found myself in an area where a force hook was needed to continue and I
was unsure if I had missed the chance to acquire it or if there was an alternative route that
would negate the need.
Eventually you get it through a quest line, but early areas are littered with these things
to the point where on multiple occasions I thought I couldn’t move on until I had found
the tool.
It’s a small price to pay for intricate, explorative level design, but it did lead
to multiple head-aches as I played.
In spite of this, all of the areas are vastly different from each other which is surprising
considering they’re all in roughly the same area, just outside the CREO complex that the
first game ends in.
Seriously, the level design in this game is off the charts and whoever is responsible
deserves a serious raise.
There’s a lot in this game, and I’m honestly having trouble keeping this relatively non-specific
to ensure that all of you who try the game discover these secrets on your own.
The Surge 2 took me by total surprise.
I expected something fairly average and bland, but instead I got an action RPG that goes
toe to toe with some of the best we’ve seen in years.
It’s incredibly impressive and I can’t applaud Deck 13 enough.
If you’re a fan of Action RPGs with robust boss fights, intricate level design, and a
vast array of equipment to craft, customize, and upgrade, then The Surge 2 is a must buy.