The Surge 2

I'm a sucker for sci-fi so of course I had to give it a chance, the first game had an interesting setting, a forgettable story and a challenging yet enjoyable combat.. How about this shuiny new sequel, well, not much has changed and that is a real shame, so, let's start with the positive; + The worl now is more open, with a wider variety of biomes, new enemies, new weapons (a lot of spiritual succesors to weapons on the first game) + Combat stays mostly the same, you now have a drone that can assist you, great for pulling enemies from groups (with mixed results) but not really powerful enough so you can cheese boss battles with it (fair enough) There are some thing that could have been improved upon and sadly didn't happen: - The game is dark, very dark, and I don't mean the narratve, you can boost the gamma all you want and you still won't see jack shit in a dark room, and the flashling apparently can't illuminate beyong 2 meters in front of you, this was annoying in the first game and it's annoying now - Speaking of narrative, the story is a forgettable as it can be, there's no clear antagonist, there's no beef to resolve, you are just a random dude killing other random dudes, this lack of direction even translates to quests, someone vaguely mentions something and is up to you to figure it all out. - Now that we are talking directions, let's talk about the lack of a map, why would you make an open world withoput a map? because this is dark souls - why would you put quest npcs in a room were enemies can ambush you so you end up attacking them accidentally, failing the quests permanently? Because dark souls - How many times can you recycle a boss before the player gets bored? apparently many, according to Deck 13 - But the worst sin of all, why in the world did they remove the ability to upgrade impalnts? All in all, this game is just sci-fi darks souls, it didn't improve upon the formula, just copied and pasted for better AND for worse

..by following the bad trend for "squeeze Open World in this game!". I just finished The Surge 1 and am still filled with awe from this gem. Critics weren't that good back in the day it was released, so I waited for a sale. The successor made almost everything worse. The graphics are better, but the gameplay and story got a massive downgrade. Silly and boring side quests, missing weapon mastery (at least in the beginning, where I'm currently at), boring enemies and a boring, soulless world.

Many armors/mods/weapons in the DLCs and a rather fun mini-story in the half-regular-zone-sized new Kraken area. The small difference between editions while on sales is worth getting the upgrade.

The Surge 2 was Deck 13's magnum opus but somehow it didn't vibe with the people and initially underperformed so much so that they left the souls formula for their next game. And it is such a shame, I gave it a shot for 6 bucks, what can go wrong and man this was such a journey of a game. The game has a relatively small but super interconnected and very vertical open world and so much different weapons and armor sets. You can make different builds combining armor, weapon and implants. Combat is very precise and they invented this directional parry which honestly made me not try this game for a long time lol. The bosses were hard but so satisfying to debunk their moves and strategies and beat them finally. People criticises the story. I think a lot of them havent' played the first game that's why. Altough I agree that the game does a poor introduction to the story but from early-mid game it keeps up and I was genuinly invested in it. And while it is a souls-like it doesn't treat its story esoteric, it is quite a story driven action rpg actually. The ending was a let down a bit but the journey was fun. The only real issue which tested my patience was the screen tearing. I have a low-end rtx 3050 gaming laptop still I hoped for a better performance given how old the game is. Instead it put my laptop to its limits ha-ha. I guess though that it works fine on a decent gaming desktop. Super underrated game, I highly recommend trying it on a sale. I beat it in 33 hours, but did my fair share of grinding, and backtracking for finishing quests so the average playtime I guess is 20-25 h.

Great game. It is very demanding and can be difficult. It is a lot like Dark Souls, but in a futuristic universe. If you enjoy those style of games, definitely give it a shot.