The Surge Review - Page 3
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This is especially noticeable during the boss fights. Unless you miss some trick or obvious mechanic, you shouldn't die more than a couple of times on any of the game's bosses. There's also not that many of them.
Understandably, this can be disappointing to a lot of people. On the other hand, personally, I never saw boss fights in these games as anything but a skill check that prevented me from doing what I actually enjoyed, which was exploring expansive levels, learning about the game's world, discovering new items and secrets, and trying out various characters builds. Still, when I defeated one of the game's bosses by running past a bunch of robot arms and mindlessly smashing its core without being in any real danger, even I could see just how lacking the boss design of The Surge was.
On the plus side, each of the boss fights has some trick to it that makes the fight harder, but in the end rewards you with better loot, so at least you can challenge your skills that way.
As opposed to the bosses, the basic enemies can be quite tricky. They generally avoid cheap tactics like swarming you with superior numbers or pushing you into bottomless pits, and instead they fight fair, but do quite a bit of damage. The game's animations are fluid and precise enough that I never felt that I took damage when I shouldn't have. And since every attack feels like it has a lot of weight behind it, the combat can be quite satisfying, especially when you manage to pull off a finishing move a fraction of a second before getting hit.
Of course things rarely are perfect, and in The Surge, this is most obvious around staircases and corners. Attacks seem to hate connecting on the former and enemies tend to get stuck on the latter.
Another questionable thing is that because of how the game is set up, most enemies have access to the same weapons as you do. Which creates a situation where it can be quite tricky to tell what they're doing at any given moment. Due to the fact that the moves they use are essentially “player moves,” their attacks aren't telegraphed well enough, in my opinion. An AI enemy's attacks should be more obvious and exaggerated and you should be able to read and avoid them, but in The Surge, the only way to learn how many attacks in a combo you'll need to dodge is to fight the enemy a few times.
Moving on to something more positive, the game's level design and the resulting exploration is quite decent. The game is split into several expansive self-contained areas and each of those has a single Ops station where you can level up and upgrade your gear. As a result, with just one safe spot per level, the amount of shortcuts you'll be able to unlock can be staggering. Everything in the game is assembled in such a way that you're free to explore at your own pace but you can also just book it past most obstacles once you know where you're going. Unfortunately, the game doesn't have a real map, so in order to find your way you'll need to rely on your own sense of direction and the occasional “wall maps” that show your rough position and are completely unhelpful.
What I didn't like as much was the fact that weapons and armor were upgraded in a more or less linear fashion. In The Surge you generally reach a new area, discover new upgrade materials, upgrade your gear, move on and repeat. I liked how in the original Dark Souls if you knew where you were going, or just were thorough enough when exploring, you could find extremely strong items and upgrade materials fairly early, which could lead to a number of fun overpowered builds.
In fact, overpowered builds is what The Surge lacks most in my opinion. Sure, you can get fairly strong and the game isn't that difficult to begin with, but somehow I doubt that it has enough build and item variety to let you run around naked at level 1 and still one-shot pretty much everything you see.
I also found it a bit odd that there were no ranged weapons in the game. Seeing your drone shoot lasers at will and getting showered with missiles by certain enemies just makes it weird to keep using giant hammers and riot staves to solve your problems.
Augmented Content
Since the game launched quite a while ago, we can now purchase the so-called Augmented Edition that contains the base game along with a total of five pieces of DLC.
Three of those are fairly minor and just add some new items to the game. What's cool about those is that you don't just get the items when the game starts and instead they're scattered throughout the CREO facility in level-appropriate locations. On top of that, certain DLC items are wielded by new enemies, which makes the game arguably slightly harder.
