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.
Linear first-person interactive fiction with nice visuals, a fine story and excellent voice acting. No action, no puzzles and no branching paths or multiple endings. Finished in a single sitting (4 hours).
