We play as Warren, a wheelchair-bound man and new Creo employee. He goes through the process of receiving an exo-rig (which involves having the suit grafted onto him without anesthetic in an absolutely brutal cutscene), and when he wakes, the Creo facility is a wreck, and the other employees appear to have essentially become zombies that attack everything on sight. Warren needs to fight his way through and out of the Creo facility and discover what caused all the mayhem.
While Salt & Sanctuary was essentially just Dark Souls in 2D, The Surge adds a lot of its own embellishments. The Surge is an action game with stamina-based combat, relatively long animation times, and a system for dropping and retrieving your currency upon death, but that’s about where the similarities end.
The core—and most unique part—of The Surge’s combat system is derived from the fact that both Warren and all humanoid enemies are divided into six sections: head, body, two arms, and two legs, each of which can be equipped with a separate piece of armor. When you have an enemy targeted, you can select a specific body part, and Warren will aim his attacks at that body part. (However, which body part takes damage is determined by the actual hitbox collision, so targeting a body part does not guarantee hitting that body part.)
Once you’ve gotten an enemy down to a certain health threshold you can execute them, which will sever the body part if enough damage was dealt to it. If that body part was armored, you’ll receive a wrecked piece of that armor (and, if you sever an enemy’s arm, their weapon). A wrecked piece of armor (or weapon) can then be broken down into materials used to create or upgrade that type of equipment. The first time you loot a weapon you actually get it, but the first time you look a piece of armor you instead get its schematic, allowing you to craft it. Unarmored body parts take more damage, but dismembering armored body parts is how you get materials and schematics to create and upgrade your own equipment, creating a tension of which to focus on.
There’s a lot of elegance and simplicity in the system, but it also imposes a hard limit on the power of your character at each stage in the game, which can be frustrating if you hit what feels like a wall. Equipment ranks in The Surge are called “MK,” and go from I to IV (technically to V, which is a special endgame rank). I do think it’s neat how enemies follow the exact same rules that you do, and whenever you encounter an enemy you can always get their equipment. Also, in Dark Souls, different equipment sets are upgraded with different materials, which could get a bit annoying, but The Surge has no exceptions. That being said, it means you’re limited in the materials—and thus power level—for your equipment at all stages of the game. Enemies in the first area pretty much only wear “RHINO” and “LYNX” armor sets, and wrecked RHINO and LYNX armor pieces are always scrapped into MK I materials. So it’s impossible to get stronger equipment until you reach an area that has enemies that wear armor that scrap into MK II materials.
In many RPGs you’d be able to grind to improve your stats, but The Surge doesn’t have a level system that allows this. In The Surge you don’t have a level, but “core power.” You can equip active and passive abilities called implants, and each implant and piece of armor costs a certain amount of core power. (Additional implant slots are also unlocked as you increase core power, up to a cap.) That’s all core power does; there are no stats that are inherently increased by core power (although there are a few implants that scale with core power, although the scaling never felt particularly noticeable). So more core power gives you more flexibility in the armor and implants you equip, but no direct power increase. As a result, if you hit a wall, your only real option is to git gud.
But circling back to the combat and equipment system, weapons are divided into five types, each of which has its own trade-off in terms of reach, speed, power, and impact. In general each weapon of the same type has the same moveset, but certain weapons have can have a unique move or gimmick. Using a weapon grants proficiency in weapons of that type, which increases your damage. The game encourages you to focus on weapon types, but not specific weapons, which I thought was a fair compromise. In these sorts of games it’s usually the upgrade system that pigeonholes you into a single weapon the entire game, but because there are so few upgrade ranks and you can farm material from almost every enemy in the game, switching weapons is actually pretty feasible. You can mark any number of weapons as a “favorite,” which allows you to swap between them, but I only ever had two selected, as the mental load of needing to remembering the order of the weapon lineup didn’t seem worth it compared to “press to swap to the other one.”
The fact that there are no stats or skill trees means you have freedom to change your build at any point in the game, which is pretty cool. The only attribute that doesn’t (necessarily) carry over is weapon proficiency, but I don’t think it played a major factor, and it scales based on damage dealt meaning you can catch up quickly if you switch to a new weapon type mid-game. The flip side is that different builds don’t feel quite as distinctive as they might in other games, since you’re just choosing between melee weapon types rather than melee, ranged, and magic. Also, while there is huge freedom in your build once you reach a critical mass of core power—even healing is handled through implants, letting you decide how much or how little you want—it instead constricts your choices at the beginning of the game, which is exactly when you want the flexibility to find your footing.
Combat in The Surge features a secondary resource called energy, which is built up by hitting enemies but decays rapidly if you stop dealing damage. Energy has three uses: first, to execute enemies (which is needed to get upgrade material, as I discussed), second, to use active implants (which all either have an energy cost or a limited number of uses per rest), and third, to activate your drone. Near the beginning of the game you get a personal drone that follows you around and perform certain attacks (at the cost of energy). The drone is your ranged option, and can be used to pull enemies from a distance or get some additional damage in, but isn’t consistent enough to create a ranged damage build. (After all, using it requires energy, which requires melee combat.) When out of combat, if you have energy, you can “charge” one shot of your drone, which is actually a nice feature that lets you carry over energy from one fight to the next. Another neat touch is that the energy bar will put a marker showing the amount of energy needed to use each of your active abilities.
Energy is fine, and actually provides a nice risk-reward trade-off since it’s an effectively limitless resource but you need to put yourself in danger to obtain it, but I wish that healing implants and other active implants had been mapped to separate buttons. While it was my own choice I limited myself to two implants (as I said earlier), since with three or more implants I was worried it’d be harder to select the implant I needed in a pinch (which could easily lead to death). So I had one healing implant that had a certain number of uses per rest, and a second healing implant that operated off energy for longevity, and… that was it. There were a bunch of cool buffs (that I would’ve loved to spend all my excess energy on) that just didn’t fit into my build. Ah well.
The Surge has four different damage types, and each armor has separate stats for each damage type… but it’s not clear what they actually mean. What kind of damage does each attack type do? Which damage type is more effective on armored versus unarmored body parts? Are certain body parts more susceptible to different types of damage? Nobody knows, and even now online discussions are filled with tons of conflicting information. So you basically just have to ignore it all and grab the highest numbers without much deeper thought. The main consideration for armor (other than the core power cost) is not going to be the armor value, but the bonus you get for assembling the full set. These bonuses can be pretty substantial, which also means you’re rarely—if ever—going to mix and match sets (which is a bit disappointing, since fashion can be a fun component of these types of games).
Defensively, besides your dodge, you have a block, duck, and jump, but they’re all kind of janky. Ducking and jumping feel like the main innovations here, but it’s difficult to tell which attacks you can actually duck under and jump over, so it basically never felt worth it to roll the dice and always safer to just do a regular dodge or block. The Surge commits the sin of making blocking really good, which can make combat boring slugfests. Blocking consumes some stamina, but (if the attack is blockable) blocks all damage (which feels odd because all Warren does to block attacks is lift his arms, but I digress). The issue is that certain attacks can inconsistently bypass your block, which is why it feels janky. However, once you get armor that increases your stamina regeneration, it becomes feasible to take out many humanoid enemies (including bosses!) with the safe, slow and boring loop of baiting out a melee attack, blocking and counter attacking, and hitting a few times (pausing to recover your stamina during the enemy’s stumble animation).
In many Souls-likes you have a limited number of different attacks, meaning picking the correct attack at the correct moment is deliberate and crucial. However, in The Surge, you have a large number of potential attacks and combos, which makes learning and employing them difficult.You only have two different attack buttons, like many Souls-likes, but rather than light and heavy attack, they’re horizontal and vertical attack, which feel like pointless labels. There actually aren’t that many different attacks, but the issue is that there’s no consistency. For instance, for a given weapon, there might be two different possible attacks for each step of the combo. So if the horizontal attack and the vertical attack at each step was always the same it would be one thing, but which attack is horizontal and which is vertical can depend on the combo up to that point, which makes learning and remembering the attacks difficult. Consequently, on offense combat often felt more like button mashing than a calculated assault.
I do have a theory as to core, underlying issues with The Surge’s combat, and I think it might surprise you. You ready?
The issue with The Surge is: healing is instantaneous.
Sounds like an odd “problem,” doesn’t it? If you’ve played Dark Souls or Monster Hunter, I’m sure you’ve died while trying to heal and wished the healing animation was faster or nonexistent plenty of times. But you need to be careful what you wish for. In Dark Souls, the fact that healing is slow makes it exciting. I’m going to say that, in Dark Souls, on average, you can take 3-5 hits before dying. Once you’ve taken 2-3 hits, you become faced with a choice: you can look for an opening to heal, which will put you back in the safe zone but likely kill you if you mistime it, or try to finish off the enemy, which will let you safely heal afterwards but kill you if you take another attack or two. It’s a real choice fraught with risk and reward, that you need to face each time you get low on health in a fight.
But if you can heal instantly… the choice evaporates. When you get low, you heal up, no thinking about it. But in that case, what’s the point of incremental damage? If at any moment you can instantly heal from any amount to full, the only health values that matter are 100 and 0. You can see the result of this in The Surge, where you often die in 1-2 hits. If damage can’t stick, then enemies are only a threat if they can 100-0 you in a combo, and they can. Attacks in Dark Souls generally have a trade-off between speed and power, but many enemies in The Surge have incredibly strong attacks with basically no tell or wind-up. Fights can end in the blink of an eye after one mistake, which can make repeated deaths frustrating, and which incentivizes slower, defensive, safer approaches over more dynamic and exciting playstyles.
Instant healing sounds great, but then requires a buff on the other side of the arms race between players and enemies, which can be even worse.
Since it’s a Souls-like, The Surge has a system where you drop your resources upon death and need to recover them, but The Surge’s twist is the fact that you’re on a time limit. This initially sounded stressful to me, but I think it was actually tuned appropriately, and you bank additional time for every enemy you kill. I just talked about how the way The Surge is set up encourages you into slow, defensive play, but this time limit pushes you to kill enemies as fast as you can to race to your tech scrap, and that tension is actually one of my exciting features of the game. I think I lost my tech scrap to the timer only once or twice, so ultimately the mechanic added a lot of excitement for little cost. (The timer is also the key to easy farming of tons of tech scrap, but I won’t go into that here.)
One of the main draws of Souls-like games is often their level design, and The Surge delivers its unique take here as well. The key feature of The Surge’s level design is the fact that each level has one and only one rest point. This means that each level bends back itself over and over and over again as you constantly unlock shortcuts and new paths back to Ops (your base). Dark Souls is beloved for having an expansive game world with interlocking levels, and I feel like The Surge captures that within each level even if the levels themselves are discrete. The proper shortcuts can be tough to remember when you backtrack, but that’s a separate issue… The Surge has a jump (separate from the defensive jump I mentioned earlier), also expanding exploration options. They also do something neat with the “one Ops per level” limit in the final area of the game, but I won’t spoil the specifics.
The story exists, and in general it’s presented in a more straightforward manner than in Dark Souls, with dialogue and audiologs, but most of the plot is still left to implication, which does provide food for speculation and fan theories if you’re into that. Even “the surge” itself is never explicitly explained! Quests are very much in the style of Dark Souls where you run into some characters a few times, and need to talk to them (and sometimes perform a simple task) to get them to spawn in the next area. The plot is enough to propel you through the game, but unfortunately ends on a disappointing note. There are two endings, but they’re basically the same and neither is good, which makes me question why we bothered doing what we did and why the developers bothered programming the choice.
The graphics and aesthetic are great, with high quality and cohesive design. Every area is littered with heavy machinery, creating a dark, gritty atmosphere. Lighting was generally dark (but never to the point where it was difficult to see), and both the catwalks over vast chasms and claustrophobic tunnels were spooky. The game has a great little effect when you enter maintenance tunnels that causes the music to lower in volume and wash out, creating a tense atmosphere of isolation. The levels overall feel like they were designed as an actual research and production facility, although there are just enough quirks to prevent you from forgetting that it’s actually a video game level. For instance, at one point I found an ordinary-looking office that was accessible only by maintenance tunnels, which obviously wouldn’t happen in a real facility. One element of the design I really liked is that there are guides on the walls all over the facility, meaning the game often directs you to shortcuts to Ops when you get close to them.
The Surge is a smooth, polished, perfectly fine sci-fi Souls-like that was clearly designed with care and attention, and which has nothing pushing it over the edge but a few weights pulling it down. The body part system is neat, and I appreciate the fact that the weapon and armor system is absolutely consistent with no exceptions, but those things aren’t great. The plot is vague enough to be interesting but not engaging beyond the game’s runtime. Combat works fine, but enemy attacks are scaled to unfair levels to compensate for the ridiculous healing available to players. The game just needed a surge of something more to push it from good to great.
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