Game Review: The Surge

Real talk: gainful employment, while useful for keeping oneself housed, fed, and stocked with games, is the crappest concept humans have ever come up with. You’ll work 50 hours a week for 50 years, at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village, hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time.

Be that as it may, the grass sure ain’t greener 70 years in our future. The working conditions experienced by Warren, the amnesiac protagonist of this Action-RPG, make us feel very happy with our current lot in life, fellow drones.

Because actual drones. In this dystopia you’ll be zapped and stabbed into obedience by flying automatons. If that doesn’t motivate you, a zombified, exo-rigged HR rep will be along shortly to right-size you into the next life. Don’t think it won’t happen often, either, because every shift in this job is Dark Souls levels of difficult. Every death has the potential to rob you of your hard-earned pay packet of tech scrap.

This, of course, is the main currency that fuels the growth of your power core (read: player level). It may also be spent on  building and upgrading exosuit body parts and industrial tools turned makeshift weapons.

Plot twist: you can’t just order new bits from a kiosk, or space Amazon. To get ahead in this corporation you need to literally rip a fellow employee’s noggin off to score their sweet helmet. Want some fancy new cyber arms and robo legs? You’ll need to stop mindlessly thrashing craniums and go out on a limb to get them.

The Surge’s targeting system is the coolest Souls differentiator.  Let’s say Bob from Shipping & Receiving is shambling towards you, for example. A quick lock-on will reveal he has an armoured leg and chest. Repeatedly bashing those will make the dismember function appear, and will net you gear, after a very long brawl.

Alternatively, if your health is low and you’re fresh out of medkits, shiving his exposed areas could earn you back some HP (if you’ve installed the implant perk that allows this). Risk, reward, and gratuitous violence with stylish slowmo killcams. That’s how The Surge gets its downsizing on.

The enhancement options available for your rig and arsenal feel quite rudimentary, too. Most attitude-adjusters you wield can only be beefed up a small handful of times, and their efficiency can also, very vaguely, be improved via repeated use. This will feel like a step down for any Souls aficionado who loves to craft and tweak.

Likewise, the pool of unique and genuinely useful implants is pretty shallow. We found ourselves lazily clipping in multiple repeats of the two types we liked, which is a missed opportunity for anybody hoping to tailor Warren into a grey area class beyond ‘slow tank man’ or ‘zippy stab guy made out of balsa wood’.

We also feel that Deck13 didn’t put enough effort into boss battles, which is a big deciding factor for any player tempted to make a sea change from Lothric. Aside from a few late-stage surprises, having near-future credibility just hampers the creativity needed for cool juggernaut designs.

So, more often than not, you’re fighting the CREO corporation’s largest trash compactors and security mechs. Don’t expect many of them to blindside you with left-field attack patterns or transformations. Providing you’re not hideously under-levelled, these are first-, maybe second-attempt kills.

Many of you will take that as a big vertical attack to your central-lower unit, but don’t despair. The Surge does successfully crib-note off FromSoftware elsewhere. Seemingly unrelated areas in these sprawling factories/junkyards/offices all link back together in cool little eureka discovery moments. They’re also chock full of creepy little environmental storytelling moments, conversationalist NPCs, interesting audiologs, and a general sense of dread.

The addictive lure of exploring a cyberpunk world gone to hell, centimetre by centimetre, is why we enjoyed The Surge, despite its deficiencies. Over time we even came to prefer its brand of strategic, melee-heavy fisticuffs over Dark Souls and Bloodborne combat (which is saying a lot).

Deck13 has stepped up to take a lash at Souls’ patented sadism. Some swings are short of the target, but the bulk have landed where they should. Much like Warren’s exo-rig, this is a sturdy base to build something truly potent.

 

Score: 7/10

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