The Surge Review

The recent rise in popularity in challenging or “Hardcore” Action RPG’s mimicking the very successful Dark Souls formula has proven to be quite the revolution. Now that the expectations surrounding them are in place – unforgiving, tough and just plain brutal – developers can do more of a deep dive and think of ways to change up this formula, add twists that set them apart from the norm and gain a following of their own.

The Surge captures this essence better than any Souls-like seen so far, taking the dark broody horror tone and replacing it with a dark Sci-Fi horror tone instead. With some cool new concepts to boot, it continues to hold my attention, even after many hours of dismembering zombie robots and harvesting their parts for my badass exo-suit. All in a day’s work, really.

While the story fumbles at times, the atmosphere is strong. With mini-maps not easily accessible, the environments are all very familiar in this futuristic, mechanical universe, but they still somehow make the maze-like paths memorable through smart level design and recognizable landmarks. The industrial setting is full of dark factories and incomplete production lines that have a real sense of foreboding, like an enemy could be waiting around any corner (and they usually are).

To upgrade your exo-suit, you’ll need to get scrap, along with specific parts that can only be gained by dismembering your robot foes. Want to upgrade your leg armour? You’ll need to hack off some legs that are protected by gear of their own, and so on. Repeating areas didn’t feel like a chore, as I constantly had my own mission in mind of which parts I required for upgrades, and took glee in every satisfying, brutal, slow-motion kill. Dissecting enemies, literally and figuratively, to try and get the absolute most out of every encounter, always feels fantastic, with blood raining down and body parts flying around the screen in a beautiful display of violence.

It’s risk versus reward at its best; if you want specific parts, it’s likely they are protected, which means it takes longer to successfully get kills, putting you in jeopardy. While it’s a bit more forgiving than other games in the genre, death is simply part of the experience, and you’ll get a multiplier on scrap the more enemies you kill in a row without banking them back at the Medbay. If you die, you’re on a time limit to retrieve what was lost, creating an urgency that kept me on edge.

A lot of time in The Surge is spent swapping out and upgrading the different parts, finding combinations that work well against specific enemies and deciding which weapon you’ve looted is the most damaging is very satisfying, with lots of additional implants to be found that give more traditional buffs to your stats. The RPG nerd in me absolutely loved this, as I quickly checked each new part and decided which to wear in a very messed-up mechanical hyper-masculine version of dress-up Barbie.

It definitely helps that I’m a veteran of this challenging sub-genre of RPG now, but it needs to be said that for a newcomer, this style of game is going to sting at first, but like Souls before it, the satisfying back and forth between upgrading your character and progressing through hordes of enemies that previously felt insurmountable is one of the best feelings you can have while playing video games.

The only times I truly felt irritated and that the game was being unfair was during the boss encounters, where I usually died instantly without being able to take any proper learning’s from what had happened. The camera also doesn’t always cooperate when there are multiple enemies on screen at once, and the lock-on mechanic sometimes didn’t seem particularly intuitive, resulting in some unfortunate mistakes.