The Surge

The game itself is a fun but grindy first person melee fighting game with a nice but cliché SciFi story. You are a guy in a wheel chair who joins a company because they promise to make you walk again. Then (obviously) something goes wrong and you have to fight your way from location A to location B while killing hordes of former employees who turned insane. Per se, an enjoyable experience with good graphics, nice sound, acceptable gameplay. Except: You cannot manually save the game. The game only saves at the medbay. There is just one medbay per level, right at the beginning. Every time you enter the medbay to heal or upgrade equipment, ALL enemies you previously killed respawn. So the game encourages you to take risks, and the risks are great for you are underpowered. If you die, you respawn there as well, and have to fight your way back to regain your loot. Ergo you play through the same enemies over, and over, and over again, ad nauseam to farm resources because you have to. What nobody tells you is, there is a hidden game mechanic: If you die but go on a killing spree before regaining your loot, the game rewards you by doubling it, and if you keep doing that hit the 10 million resource cap in less than 30mins. Which finally breaks it. Either you don't know the mechanic and get increasingly frustrated with the slow grind, or you do and soon are swimming in expensive gear to the point where it is no fun anymore either. On a side note: Needless brutality. As a core mechanic, the game makes you tear you human opponents to pieces to collect x legs, or x arms, or x torsos, or x heads to "recycle" into parts for upgrades. There is no reason in the game for why you need to do that. You wear the very same gear and you can put it on and take it off without chopping your head off, so why you can't do the same with a defeated enemy is beyond any logic. All in all: Okay-ish game, it is fun, looks nice, but is repetitive with a tat too much frustrating grind.

You'll have to get through the frustration of never knowing where to go. You'll also need the patience to figure out how to damage bosses. But you'll figure it all out. I believe in you. The Surge is a criminally underrated souls game. I can't believe no one talks about it.

I was hesitant to purchase this, but now that I did, I really don't understand why a lot of people seem to hate on this game so much. Is it a perfect gem? Definitely not. Is it buggy and clunky? Not at all. Did it do anything revolutionary or outstanding? Nope. However, it is a very solid action game, with good controls, fluent animation and decent graphics. Some people argue that the combat system is janky and the hitboxes are messed up. I did not experience anything like that at all. In fact, I would dare to say that The Surge has a better and more refined combat system than any of the Dark Souls entries. You can do crazy combos, target body-parts and do outrages finishing moves, and the whole experience is just very fluent and very satisfying. I also like the designs very much. The machinery looks believable, the exo-suits look cool, and strolling around in a giant industrial complex feels very atmospheric. The crafting system is pretty decent too, and makes more sense than in most games. It's also kinda neat how you collect certain crafting material by smashing the right pieces off of enemies' armor. My biggest beef with this game is that it resembles Dark Souls too much. The usual Souls-like elements like the respawning enemies just feel awkward and off-putting in a sci-fi setting, in my opinion. The cryptic story is also a big let down for me. I want to know what happened, and I don't want to have to play a new game++ or browse forums for hours in order to find all the evidence and clues I need to piece together a half-finished story. These things make me feel like the developers or the publisher wanted this to be Dark Souls so much that it ended up losing its own identity along the way. This makes me really sad, because I honestly think that if the developers had more time and perhaps more funding, they could have made something very special and outstanding. I would say if you think that Dark Souls 3 is a 5/5 game, than this is at least 4/5.

Two stars because I really like SF settings and game world. Progress is so slow (read very boring) because you have to repeat same areas for hours. Would be much better if dodge (a crucial feat) would not fail so much.

Nice SiFi Hack and Slay. I still miss a sniper gun after a few hours in the game, but it is fun to play. Dying puts you back to medbay, but you have a bit over two minutes to get your dropped stuff. Enemies reappearing after you were in the medbay is a con and pro at the same time, depending on your viewpoint, it reminds me of Borderlands where the same thing happens - though it is a bit tedious in Borderlands while The Surge opens shortcuts when playing through a level, making the route to your package shorter and allows skipping areas. There is no strategy though, so it is good to get down after work. Got the Augmented edition though. Right when it came out, a day before GOG sent the "The Surge is avail on GOG now!" newsletter ;).