Visuals 5 out of 5 The game’s aesthetics, atmosphere, weapons, and all those visuals are good. Mechanics 4 out of 5 There are a few settings that you might want to toggle and see if you prefer locking on to the enemy or not. If those settings are on, then your attacks would seem very clunky. Drops 3 out of 5 The item drops are often of low value. You will need to harvest tons of them to be able to do anything useful. Frustrating, if you ask me. Upgrading system 2 out of 5 Confusing and poorly-designed inventory system, the crafting and upgrading menus are amongst the most unintuitive and convoluted I have seen. Orientation/location awareness 0 out of 5 -5 if I could. This alone means that the game is not for me. The target audience is someone who has a great spacial/location awareness/memory. There’s no useful map/mini-map/guidance as to where you are in relationship to the rest of the complex. You either love it or hate it, and I’m in the latter camp. Lots of players actually love that sense of “adventure,” for a particular definition of the term “adventure.” Regardless of the philosophy behind the level design, it’s not for me. Story 2.5 out of 5 I gave up playing the game 11 hours in, so I cannot tell you if the story makes sense at the end; not appealing enough to pull me in to endure the disorientation torture. Overall 2.75 out of 5 I had some entertainment that justifies the discounted price. The orientation issue genuinely diminished the enjoyment of the game for a great many players and cannot easily be dismissed. Would I get the game knowing what I know now? No, I wouldn’t. The puzzles of the game are the maps and locations: ‘where the **** am I, now?’ Last words If you like pathfinding challenges, then by all means, dive into the colourful world of The Surge. It’ll provide you with hours of labyrinths, same-looking passages and corridors, inter-connected pathways that wrap around if you pay attention, and so on. Not a pathfinder? Then stay away!
I am not a big fan of a lot of RPS and open world games, but this one seems to have a balance that feels right to me. Although you will get missions to complete, there are a lot to explore on the side too. So, you will get the best of the both world.
The mechanics of the game is not that hard to get. However, there are enough challenges and interesting upgrade paths that makes you feel like you need to come back and complete only one more mission. Before you know it, you are a few h ours into the game and you are still playing it. I am not that much of a fan of games with such retro graphics. Nevertheless, there is so much in the game that pull me in over and over. There are a few annoyances in the game that I wished they could be sorted out 9although there is zero chance that would ever happen): the fights come with statistics and text after each hit. I wish that could have been disabled altogether (although there are options in the settings to speed them up, but they are super annoying even at 3 times the speed). The intro/extro animations to/from each fight is also super long and unnecessary. I wish that could have been disabled. Aside from these, the rest seems to be great! I highly recommend this game if you are into retro games.
