The Surge 2 even allows players to choose how to play the game on a more fundamental level. With many differences in attack speed, power, and elemental effects, combat options are nearly limitless. Players will find these new weapons everywhere by cutting off enemy limbs, completing sidequests, or even just carefully searching nooks and crannies. There’s a weapon for every playstyle here - huge heavy clubs, light punching daggers, swords, and even staves for martial arts enthusiasts. The arsenal in The Surge 2 is a huge strength, offering a shocking variety of armaments thanks to eight different weapon classes, all with their own movesets and half a dozen variants in each. Only a trip to a comparatively bland cave system stands out as anything but a pleasure to visit. Thanks to this, players are never more than a couple of minutes away from the med-labs that serve as save points and upgrade stations.Įach region also has a completely different look - there’s a ravaged downtown core, docks held together by crudely-rigged maintenance, a forest park where foes hide in the underbrush, and more. This new fallen city is a huge improvement over the sterile, anonymous industrial areas of the previous installment.Īfter just a few minutes in each new zone I was able to navigate with very little trouble, and the level designers have apparently taken the lessons of Dark Souls to heart by building verticall- interconnected levels full of unlockable shortcuts. The dedicated (or masochistic) are free to uninstall the implant at any time, but I found The Surge 2‘s willingness to help me block and deflect attacks incredibly useful, instantly catapulting it into being one of the most accessible Soulslikes.Īnother major improvement can be found in the map design. Starting players off with this ability is a great move by the developers, as it’s essentially a study guide to help learn enemy attack patterns. This particular one shows them the direction enemy attacks are coming from, as well as whether or not those attacks can be blocked. It’s definitely a more robust and fleshed-out narrative than before.Īs with all descendants of the Dark Souls legacy, careful, stamina-based third-person combat is the name of the game here, although this game is more forgiving than most in the genre.Īfter a brief tutorial teaching attacking, defending and stamina, players are handed a implant - it’s one of the interchangeable ‘mods’ that the character’s exo-skeleton can use to unlock new abilities. Whether it’s mad scientists working on a cure, rich dilettantes hiding from threats in a swanky hotel, or doomsday cultists embracing the end of everything, the campaign is littered with characters to chat with, audiolog backstories and side-stories fleshing out the world. Where the first Surge showed the immediate aftermath of a horrible cataclysm, The Surge 2 takes place months later, where the people trapped inside the quarantined city have built their own tiny society. While the main character isn’t interesting - players build their own mute avatar - the story they’re at the center of is a compelling one. The player’s mission is to explore the crumbling city, gather the resources they’ll need to upgrade and survive, and find some way to stop this techno-apocalypse. The Surge 2 opens during the events of the previous game, with the player waking up from a coma to find themselves in a shattered city full of desperate scavengers, hostile government troops, and terrifying beasts grown from the nanotechnology anomaly that kicked off the original Surge. With The Surge 2, the developers take another swing at the subject matter and score a far more impactful hit. Set in a brutal world of exo-suited grunts violently dismembering one another, the interesting look and solid combat was undercut by baffling boss design and locations so bland and repetitive that they were nearly impossible to navigate. WTF Hey, is that the star of the first game?!Ģ017’s The Surge brought Soulslike gameplay to a near-future setting, and did so with a decent amount of style. LOW The boss featured on the cover art is ludicrously annoying. HIGH The Nanotech Cult’s power plant stronghold.
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