The Surge 2

A really good game, improved from the first one. Really worth playing if you are a souls-like fun.

It's a decent game, however, most of the difficulty comes from clunky camera movement and the not-so-great parrying system. There are a lot of narrow places in the game where you fight multiple enemies and having the camera somewhere between the enemies' buttocks doesn't help. The parry system is good on paper, you have to flick the mouse (I don't have a controller so the review is based on K&M gameplay) in the right direction just before you get hit but half the time it just doesn't register even if you time it right. I guess with an exorbitant amount of practice you could get it to work maybe 3 out of 4 times tops, but there just isn't enough game to warrant that kind of dedication and it still wouldn't be that useful or fun to do. If you can get it at a decent discount it's probably worth it if you like soulslikes.

I started with Demons Souls and have played the whole series. I've sampled Lords of the Fallen and The Surge. The Surge 2 combat instantly feels better then Deck13's other attempts. Loot/Upgrading is arguably better then soulsborne. I didn't even care about progession in the first area because I was just looting because the game has so much useful loot that you actually use. I got an armor set that now let's me dismember without using the power bar. You might call this game funsouls. Game is hard, but fair likely easier then newer soulsgames and more off a demons souls and dark souls difficulty except with much better progession where you don't feel the need to grind and in some way's grinding is fun in this game. You will instantly feel at home when you face the dual like intro boss and you'll notice a lion like robot that you will likely fight later. I'm even starting to spark and eye at the story. The story basically seems to be about A.I. having caused things to change on earth and now factions have formed with different views like A.I. is an abomination or A.I. is are savior or that we should merge and acsend. I'm currently at a camp where the church like leader believes humans and machine must merge to attain eternal life or something. Earlier I ran into another camp that was hostile and likely trying to restore order. Game seems a bit like a soulslike with elex faction system just less open world. The game also as been sporting a lot of shortcuts and I've yet to run into fast travel nor have I had the interest in using fast travel. I'm guessing technical issue's have to do with the vulkan api the developers have used and they're lack of experience in using a challenging api. I'm my end however I'm running linux and using wine with Proton 5.0. The game runs not with dxvk, but actual vulkan in wine and runs without issue. Also runs great because Linux/AMD love vulkan. This game is exremely underrated, I highly recommend.

[Played on gamepad] First and foremost, this game crashes regularly. In a game as frustrating as a Dark Souls-like, it's important not to be dragged back to desktop. Maybe this isn't an issue with other people.. I dunno. Crashed on me several times in the few hours I gave it. Also if you alt-tab the game will run poorly until you restart (both windowed and fullscreen). Putting that aside though, I found the mechanics incredibly obtuse. The menus were also just frustratingly hard to understand (needlessly noisy UI in upgrade and inventory menus). Attacks do form nice combos, but the timing for the combos isn't lined up at the end of the individual move animations, so there's no seeing when the game wants you to hit the next button. This meant I'd do a different combo every time I tried to input a particular one. Animations are appropriately slow (as they should be for this style of game), but often inputting one or two attack buttons results in 3 or 4 attack animations somehow. Which is frustrating when I'm trying to hit them once or twice in a window that will punish me if I try for a third hit. So now you're supposed to memorize what 2-button combos will cause you death and avoid ever doing them (for each unique weapon). As a new player, I get no que as to when my combo timings are, and each weapon has completely different types of combos so learning one will only hurt you when you switch weapons. The game DOES explain a parry system, but despite nailing the timing on it regularly, I'd get a parry maybe every 5th or 6th well-timed parry. I have no problem timing things in much faster paced action titles, and maybe this is supposed to be the challenge (don't rely on parry). But there's no tutorial about what attacks are and are not parry-able, and there's no "late" or "early" que when I miss my parry. So I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. In general it's a painful experience. I'm ok with dificult games, but this just leaves me in the dark.

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