The Surge 2

The game feels rushed. The enemies hit harder, you do less damage, and you have very few means to improve your character in comparison to the first Surge. To highlight the stark difference between the two games, you'll have the ability to get three full armor sets and several weapons before fighting the first boss in Surge 1. In Surge 2, you get only two weapons, and they aren't effective weapons to fight the first boss. The environments are brighter and more open, but they aren't inherently better. You'll still encounter traps where you'll get swarmed by enemies in tight corridors. It'll just look prettier when you die to cheap and unfair tactics. My main complaint is they didn't fix the stun mechanic. I hated how the enemy can stun you hard but you couldn't do the same to them. They 'fixed' this issue in Surge 2 by enabling a Parry mechanic that isn't reliable to pull off. If you botch the parry, you lose all your stamina and open yourself up to a full combo, which will likely kill you. The risk versus reward isn't there, so I stopped Parrying and used the evasion feature like I did in Surge 1. In summary, it's more of the same as the first game but harder and most importantly, more annoying.

I will keep it short, and sweet. Think of what you played a bit before of The Surge. Which personally stands out as one of the most enjoyable takes on the Souls like games of recent. What I can say about it might not be true for all, and many could not jell with it, and that is fine. What this game does, and offer ALOT of weapons, armor pieces, and all sorts of secrets that expand on what Surge originally tried to do. Play stylists will be pleased with the game. As it blends speed, timing, and style all into the gore as a delightful mixture. The story in the game is workable, and does its job, but it is not the center of attention for this game, its the combat, the exploring, and the at times brutal enemies trying to rip your head off. If you loved how fast Bloodborne was on PS4, and know you aren't going to see it on PC at this point and time, but need that fix. This game is not as Gothicually beautiful as Bloodborne, but still hits it home with challenging bosses, and overall fun factor.

If you've played Lords of the Fallen and the original Surge, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was going to be another ho-hum Souls clone. I can say this: Deck13 has really improved when it comes to gameplay, boss design, and stage design. I think The Surge was a big step forward and The Surge 2 is a polished, nicer version of it with much cleaner combat mechanics and a more interesting world to explore. I think the combat is pretty great in this game: a bit of a combination of Sekiro and Dark Souls with its own limb-targeting mechanic included. You want to be timing your blocks and blocking from the right direction (forward, left, right, below) in order to get an enemy off guard and then targeting a part to earn it for you own. Collecting the various weapons and armor is addictive. It's all somewhat similar, but at least looks visually different and has different stats. The game is fun to speed run: lots of paths through the game, it's possible to move very quickly, and if you're imagining the game as being slow and plodding like Lords of the Fallen or The Surge, you're mistaken! It's not perfect. Here are my main complaints: - The story sucks - Sound design could be better - Graphics are so-so (but honestly not awful) - Although the combat has been polished a lot, there are still a couple of enemies and bosses that are janky. Relatively few, though. Overall, I was really impressed with this game, played the heck out of it, and it's definitely my favorite Dark Souls that isn't Dark Souls.

Review for the base game without any DLC. Deck13 keeps improving and The Surge 2 is their best soulslike yet. Unfortunately it's still far from the quality of the top offerings from FromSoft and Team Ninja. Improvements over The Surge include faster and smoother combat and more environmental variety. The new directional parry mechanic is a mixed bag. The directional aspect adds almost nothing over having non-directional parries, and the overuse of difficult-to-read windup animations in enemy attacks gets tiresome. On the positive side, the big damage opportunity reward after a set number of successful parries on bosses is fun, and the limited but easily recharged healing system is good. Level/area design is much better than The Surge, but is still one of the weakest points of the game. Very few areas are memorable, and several areas feel like they could have been randomly generated. Cramped, cluttered, and/or anonymous area design causes the large amount of interconnectedness to become confusing and tedious. "A jumbled mess" is another description fitting many of the areas. The exolines (zip lines) are pretty neat, but also provide a means for lazy area design. The bosses are generally an improvement over The Surge, but some of the fights still suffer from misdirected gimmicks that fail to meld with the core combat mechanics. The "Metal Armor" fight being perhaps the clearest example. A couple of bosses are repeated several times over, and at least one boss is "just" a souped-up version of a regular enemy. The game crashed to desktop about once per hour (three times) before I set it to run as administrator, after which it never crashed again. Not really an acceptable solution on principle but it seems to work. Games I would recommend over The Surge 2 include all of FromSofts offerings, both of the Nioh games and Code Vein. If you've exhausted all of that and still feel an itch to play a soulslike, I would say The Surge 2 is a decent choice.