Everyone's got that one friend. You realize the guy. He lacks discretion, or possibly he just doesn't care. In either case, he states what's on his mind. Sometimes, it hurts, and you kind of hate him, but you can't deny that he has got charisma. He makes you laugh, so you can let slide a few silly indiscretions in some places. Let's refer to this as friend Dark Souls.
But Dark Souls has this younger cousin that's constantly hanging around him. This cousin looks as much as Dark Souls. He wants to be exactly like Dark Souls. So he takes a few cues from Dark Souls and runs his mouth. The issue is, he doesn't possess his older cousin's charms. He says the wrong things in the wrong way. That guy's name is The Surge.
Deck13's latest Souls-like action RPG, The Surge, means well. Its heart is incorporated in the right place, and it is competent in a lot of ways. But when you are going to make a game that's punishing and unforgiving in the difficulty, charisma goes a long way towards propelling the gamer forward. This is an issue of charm, and in that Deck13 still has a great deal to gain knowledge from the series that inspired it most.
Unlike the studio's previous efforts, 2023's Lords of the Fallen, The Surgedistances itself in the tried-and-true dark fantasy formula and leaps full-force into bringing its tough-as-nails melee-based combat right into a sci-fi setting. You play as the painfully generic Warren, who's starting a brand new job at mega corporation Creo. The twist is the fact that Warren is in a wheelchair, and part of the reason he wants to work on Creo would be that the tech giant is promoting exo-suits that will allow him just to walk again.
But as soon as he gets set up together with his new metal legs, the neural link in the exo-suit malfunctions. Warren passes out to have an undisclosed period of time, so when he awakens, killer robots and brainwashed cyborg employees have taken over the ruins of what once was Creo. As Warren, you must make your way to the tippy-top floor and hang free the Creo executives which are trapped at the very top, in the hopes that somebody can stop the robo-rampage, all the while battling for survival against deadly enemies inside your makeshift mechsuit.
If the story doesn't sound particularly engaging, that is because it isn't. It begins sufficiently strong, going for a page out of Half-Life's book having a fateful tram commute right into a huge scientific complex. A neat camera trick saves the reveal that Warren is actually inside a wheelchair, lending some decent motivations to his decision to obtain himself drilled filled with holes (which is portrayed in a beautifully rendered and grotesque cut-scene) and have a metal skeleton grafted to his body.
Beyond this intriguing opening, however, Warren''s story is basically nonexistent. He has to go from one medbay safe-zone to another just because a mysterious Creo “board member” named Sally is telling him to and that he doesn't have any better ideas. Sprinkled through the game are collectible audio logs that serve to complete Creo's backstory and just how exactly killer robots came into power. By doing so, you're experiencing the drama of history by fighting through its future. Hey, if it worked for Bioshock, it may work in The Surge, right?
Well, yes and no. The audio logs themselves are, taken as a whole, fairly engaging, so that as you collect increasingly more, the drama and tension in Creo's downfall ramps up nicely. However, unlike in Bioshock, the primary character's trial isn't nearly as interesting because the backstory it reveals. I did not care about Warren whatsoever, also it doesn't help that customization beyond outfitting gear and choosing ammunition to pay attention to is completely lacking. If I'm going to play as a character which has less personality than the 'roided-out toaster he physically resembles, can't I a minimum of decide what he or she looks like and feel a connection to her or him by doing so? How am I supposed to feel invested in a characterless character basically can't even provide him a funny haircut or perhaps a goofy chin?
It would surely make having my skull repeatedly crushed by robotic rivals less monotonous basically at least thought about my character enough to keep him alive. Sure, Dark Souls is usually dumped on for its lack of character development, but a minimum of within the Souls series I'm able to make my character seem like John Cleese made like to a frog and then painted his offspring as blue as Violet Beauregarde and feel a weirdly intense, very specific emotional link with him since i made him. He's my unique creation, and I want to keep him alive so long as possible. I would like him to be the hero. As far as I'm concerned, The Surge's Warren might have died, his tale ending prematurely and violently, deep within the bowels of Creo's carcass, and I would've been fine with this. Just fine.
The only real customization that The Surge offers is in its gear loadout, which is where the game shines. Taking a piecemeal method of the way you outfit your particular Warren, you can either have a character suited up as an oversized Tonka truck in heavy Rhino armor, you may be hopping around without needing to worry about stamina inside a full suit of Lynx armor, or you can combine the generously diverse types of armor to specify exactly what buffs you want and make up a loadout that truly suits your play-style and requires.
That's because each piece of equipment you equip includes a tradeoff, and every type of gear-whether it's a helmet, a leg piece, a leg piece, or a body piece-will affect a particular stat. For example, your Lynx leg piece might drain a smaller amount of your stamina, while it's weak defense and low stability cause you to more vulnerable to attacks. However, you can balance that by, say, equipping a Proteus arm module, which provides you higher defense, higher stability, and increases your attack speed. On the other hand, if you choose to don a full set of a specific class of armor, you'll be treated to unique, specific passive buffs that can completely alter the way you play the game. Your best option you don't have when it comes to gear is that you will in the end seem like a jacked-up Optimus Prime regardless of what armor you equip.
The Surge is obsessed with gear, to the point where it's fully integrated into how you approach combat situations. Like the majority of souls-like games, including Lords from the Fallen, combat is based on intense third-person melee combat against humanoid (brain-washed, armored humans) and beastlike (robot) enemies with the aid of a lock-on mechanic. However, this is where The Surgestrays from the formula by allowing you to target specific parts of the body.
This limb-specific system introduces an amazing risk/reward mechanic. You can dispatch enemies rapidly if you target their weak, unarmored parts of the body. But if you want new gear, you'll have to attack armored parts of the body, which prolongs the battle and, given how fast enemies may take you down, boosts the likelihood that you'll die.
While in combat, the more times you hit an armored limb, the greater chance you've of executing a gruesome finishing move which will rend said limb from your enemy's body. This will lead to enemies dropping the types of materials necessary to build and upgrade your armor for your specific body part. If you cut off a leg, you get material to craft or change your arm pieces. Should you cut off a leg, you get material for the leg pieces, and so forth. Higher level enemies will drop higher level loot, and therefore this method of gear procurement stays relevant even just in late-game situations.
Combat is fun enough. You have two attack types, vertical and horizontal, that you can string into deadly combos. Each attack type is going to do more harm to specific body parts, so if you're targeting an enemy's leg, you'd want to use a vertical attack, while horizontal attacks are generally better for lopping off an enemy's arm. Defensively, you are able to dodge attacks or you can block. However, holding on the block button will cause your stamina to quickly drain, so it's best to time your blocks carefully and then contact a swift, punishing counterattack. Different weapon types have different attack patterns, so depending on your preferred play-style, you can cater the combat to work in your favor.
As almost as much ast it increases the game, this limb-specific targeting system also results in a number of my biggest problems with The Surge. The dependence on chopping off specific limbs for particular gear types means you will be fighting the same kind of enemy over and over again. Besides a smattering of three or four different robot enemies, every enemy in the game is a human wearing bulky, mechanical armor. The one thing that changes about them is exactly what specific armor they're wearing and what type of weapon they're using. This has to be a place where The Surge could have used some of that Dark Souls charm, where every new area is packed with new monstrosities, whose grotesque designs and different attack patterns produce a giddiness upon discovery.
The lock-on targeting presents its own issues as well. A lot of times I found myself the victim of the lock-on system that would refuse to target an enemy that was charging me or perhaps a camera that merely could not cope with the game's claustrophobic, monotonous level design, and I'd end up trapping myself inside a corner to become mercilessly wailed on by enemies.
The lock-on targeting was especially problematic during boss fights. Bosses with spider-like limbs made targeting an absolute nightmare and resulted in far more deaths than I actually deserved (which, relied on their own, were already a great deal). That's not even counting one particular boss fight, that was so frustrating that would have caused me to prevent playing the sport outright whether it wasn't my job to complete and evaluate it. Not only would the lock-on won't target areas of in charge nearest me, leading to an ungodly quantity of deaths, only one particular area of the boss kept glitching into the ground, which makes it impossible to progress in the fight.
Speaking of bosses, while they're definitely a pleasant change of pace from the normal, routine enemy types, there's only five of these, which when compared to number of bosses in Dark Souls games, seems more like an amount you'd see in a DLC, not a full retail release. However, considering that most of the bosses are defeated less by skillful dodging and blocking and much more by discovering a remarkably obscure trick to beating them or by simply cheesing them by spamming exactly the same running attack again and again, only needing to do this 5 times might be the biggest act of mercy the developers show you through the game. And, much like with the normal enemies, while the bosses in Dark Souls games are poetically monstrous abominations, the bosses in The Surgeare rejected Eggman inventions that would blend in with the scenery when they weren't attempting to kill you.
I don't mean to keep comparing it to Dark Souls, however it so clearly really wants to be that. You'll still get souls (or, in this case, “tech scrap”) for killing enemies, which you can invest in leveling up and building or upgrading armor. Should you die, you drop your pile of scraps, that you've one chance to retrieve. You've still got to create the right path from medbay to medbay (this game's version of a bonfire), unlocking new short-cuts on the way. All the broad strokes exist.
But there's a degree of polish and imagination in Dark Souls that, frankly, I'm not sure Deck13 is capable of. Whereas Dark Souls' environments seem like these were taken straight out of an intimate painting, The Surge looks most like a relevant video game. The duplicated assets which are contained in all the games seem to disappear in Dark Souls because the design is stunning and inspired. In The Surge, with its repeated textures and boxes and overall boring visual design, that copy-and-paste jobs are on full display.
That's to not say The Surge is a bad game. I enjoyed it a respectable amount and felt accomplished after i beat it. But things i felt most once the game ended (abruptly using what can barely be known as a cut-scene) was relief. I had been so glad I did not need to listen to it anymore. It's a game that asks a great deal and gives little in exchange. It's a game which has no business being as grueling because it is. It's a game that lacks, well, soul.
