Requires a lot of goodwill to enjoy it
I have not much experience with Souls-like games. I gave up 2 times on the original DarkSouls. So I played the first SURGE game, and although it was ok, I gave up around the 1st boss fight. I found the controls to be too sluggish compared to the very agile enemies and it didn't really motivate me to improve.
On this one it was a little better I guess, although the 1st boss had me close of deinstalling the game. I don't know what happened but somewhere along the way I stopped using parry and I forgot how to properly use it. The directional parry is a nice idea, but not very intuitively mapped by using the right control stick for the direction. I kind of kept using the left one, and wondered why I couldn't time any parry correctly, so I had to cheese the boss fight without parry's. Believe me, this wasn't fun, you'll need parry, especially for the later stages and bosses.
After I got comfortable with the parry system, the game kept improving. I still didn't enjoy it as much I wanted to. The level design in the second half of the game is just too dark and most enemies are just kept in boring black so I couldn't even see the animations in order to block.
The atmosphere became kind of depressing. And there were just too many annoying bits along the way.
- no matter how good I became, tackling 2 enemies at once is a nightmare with the targeting system. The fights never flowed.
- The drone needs a clean shot, to be useful. But sometimes it looks like a good angle to shoot and it still fumbles your shot. There is no indicator of some sort, and using the drone became an afterthought.
- Lots of unnecessary grinding to find or upgrade armour and to get XP.
-some weird level design that keeps wasting your time. Why do certain small interior areas need loading times?
-sometimes when you explore, you get to a new area unknowingly. After a loading screen you reach that area, only to find out that you're missing a gadget to proceed further. Why not tell me before like a good Metroidvania? Now I have to to go back to the area I came from but with respawned enemies. This happens a lot. And it ruins the fun of exploring.
-no maps neither, and the mini maps that are sprinkled into the levels, I found to be utter useless. Therefore lots of stumbling around or backtracking. So you better be good at memorizing pathways.
-no option to load immediately to the last save.
- I got to admit that I abandoned the game after 80% of completion, I can not tell if it was the lacklustre story or the empty world. It wasn't so much the difficulty, but the rewards didn't merit the effort. At least in my case.
- lastly, bugs: I've encountered several bugs, like getting stuck in an environment. And I also encountered at least 4 game crashes.
3 gamers found this review helpful