![]() With the sequel, the fights feel more kinetic and break-neck without leaving you struggling to maintain control. Sure, The Surge controlled well enough, but sometimes it felt as though you didn’t have complete control over your character or their actions. Again, fans of the whole Soulsborne style of gameplay shouldn’t expect an adventure on the same technical level as those offered by From Software, but the developers have taken great care to tighten the overall experience for the sequel. ![]() I loved doubling back to see what I could find.Īnd, for the most part, The Surge 2 feels nice. And once you level up and acquire some of the tools needed to access Jericho City’s more out-of-the-way locales, that sense of openness increases tenfold. And although you can’t go everywhere you want as soon as you arrive in Jericho City - unless you think you can handle some of the game’s tougher foes right out of the box - you still have a lot of room to move while you get a handle on how the game plays. With The Surge 2, however, Deck13 effectively kicks down the factory walls and gives you a sprawling city to explore, complete with dank, dark underground passages, bombed-out buildings, and narrow rooftops. I hope you enjoy running around a factory because that’s basically all you’re going to get. Although I loved hacking apart goons, thugs, and mechanical monstrosities to piece together my hero’s armor and weaponry during the first installment, The Surge didn’t give players very much to look at. The first thing you’ll notice: The Surge 2 is a lot more open than The Surge, and the sensation feels fantastic. As you can tell, there’s a bit more going on here story-wise than in The Surge, and it’s definitely for the best, though it doesn’t always make a lot of sense.Īfter you escape from the prison and defeat your first boss, which serves as a kind of tutorial for the game’s fighting system, you’ll finally stumble out into fresh air. As you play through the game, you’ll stumble into the middle of a violent sibling rivalry, the hunt for a nightmarish beast (and the man who wants its brain), and a mystery involving a strange little girl. Once he makes his way out of the city, Harold discovers a dystopian hellscape called Jericho City, a place inhabited by cultists, Blue Sparkle drug addicts, heavily armed thugs, and a vast array of peculiar NPCs. For this review, we’ll call my guy Harold, who seems to be in his mid-sixties with thinning, gray hair and a gait that suggests he suffers from serious (and possibly permanent) gastrointestinal problems. Picking up years after the original game, you play an individual who wakes up inside a prison cell after something very, very terrible has gone down. Without giving too much away - both for The Surge and The Surge 2 - I’ll dance around the plot with the fluidity of an elderly man strapped into several pieces of makeshift armor. It’s not a perfect experience by any stretch of your wild imagination, and it doesn’t really match the level of world-building that From Software seems to achieve with every release, but this is a worthy follow-up to a game I still feel receives far too much hate. Sure, it still doesn’t look nearly as good as other like-minded endeavors, but The Surge 2 suggests that the developers paid close attention to the complaints lodged against their previous effort. To my surprise, the follow-up to their 2017 action-RPG takes the foundation laid by the original, blows it out, injects some refinements, and spins some cheeky (and unexpected) humor into the mix. So, needless to say, I had pretty high hopes for The Surge 2, though I didn’t necessarily believe Deck13 would step too far outside the boundaries they set with the first installment. (For the record, I’ve logged more hours in The Surge than I have Bloodborne, and I really love me some Bloodborne despite my gross ineptitude at mastering its punishing gameplay.) ![]() And while I can’t argue with those on-point critiques, but it didn’t stop me from loving The Surge to death. Whatever the reason may be, I had no problem defending The Surge against people who wanted to dismiss it as nothing more than a wannabe Soulsborne game set inside a drab, uninspired location. Or maybe I just enjoy creating a character that loosely resembles Matt Damon and living out my bizarre Elysium fantasies. ![]() Maybe it’s because I’m a sucker for stories, movies, and games that meld flesh and technology in horrifying but visually satisfying ways. While I can readily admit that The Surge came packaged with some hefty problems - its same-y maze-like setting being the biggest offender - I still had an absolute blast roaming its junky landscape and assembling a hero who was equal parts man and machine. I don’t know why I’m such a sucker for Deck13’s Surge series. ![]()
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