The Surge Review

Enjoyable Misery:

If you were to ask my partner whether or not I liked “the Surge“, she’d respond with a resounding “no”. Over the last week she’s been woken up on numerous occasions at the profanity I’ve been hurling in developer Deck 13’s general direction.

The Surge has joined a pantheon of games that are enjoyable because of their controller-flinging misery, however, and Deck 13 are proving they’re a force to be reckoned with within that mashochistic genre.

Story:

The Surge is Deck 13’s second attempt at a Souls-like, but constantly comparing their efforts to that of From Soft’s brutal portfolio is becoming a trite way to describe their ever evolving work. If their previous title, Lords of the Fallen, was indeed an attempt to crack into the market that Dark Souls truly popularized, then The Surge is an evolution of their own ideas, rather than From’s.

You play a vanilla action hero type called Warren, a new hire at CREO industries. CREO’s goals are globally green-minded, trying to right the wrongs of a dying planet, but their true machinations are a little more cloudy than that. When you arrive, they drill a new exo-skeleton onto Warren to make him fit to join the workforce, although the procedure is botched and he’s dumped on the scrap heap, presumed dead.

If this seems a little cold, it is – that opening cinematic is harrowing for a number of reasons, and it definitely inspired me to find out what the heck is going on at CREO. Something happens whilst you’re out and when you wake up you find the huge complex is newly ravaged by out of control employees in their big rigs, with larger, more mechanized beasts acting as the boss fights that punctuate this creepy company tour. CREO is at times spectacularly designed, with the many winding corridors and interconnecting shortcuts building a real, tangible place in the world that’s as scary to explore as it is interesting. The Surge’s best dichotomy is when you’re engaging in all out Robot Wars battles in front of big monitors still lit up around the base, constantly playing their over-the-top ‘we’re the good guys’ ad propaganda. It’s neat touches like this that sells The Surge’s world as the remnants of a functioning company, and a place well worth exploring.

Gameplay:

RPGs that hold difficulty in such high regard often struggle with balance. Lords of the Fallen definitely fell from that particular tightrope on numerous occasions, and whilst I beat that game and enjoyed it for the most part, those moments stand out as distinct black marks against an otherwise fantastic debut. The Surge is a strong evolution of this, with a fairer difficulty curve overall and more robust base mechanics.

Lords was clunky to say the least. Your player character had some serious heft to them, and controlling him always felt a little sticky. There was a purposeful delay to every action you input, and this gummed up particularly tricky boss fights. Luckily, The Surge suffers from none of this. I chose the more agile Exo build at the beginning of the game, and throughout the title I was zipping around with fluidity and ease. Despite hating them at first, I soon gravitated towards the dual-weilding weapons after I ranked each weapon type up to level 5 (a very smart trophy/achievement nudges you into doing this) and after I locked in with the twin rigs I never looked back.

Traversing locations is very fun thanks to much more punchy controls, and a far better approach to platforming than the rest of the genre has ever accomplished. There are plenty of secrets I found jumping from perilous ledge to perilous ledge, and loads of fun little shortcuts that require some platform hopping (which made corpse-runs a lot more interesting, at least).

Now – the Surge is still an aggravating game. I threw my controller down and stormed off on numerous occasions, which is something I never find myself doing with similar titles in the genre. But the Surge has a habit of lodging in my subconcious and gnawing away, always enticing me back. Whilst it asks a lot of you, nothing the Surge tasks you with overcoming could ever really be considered unfair. This is thanks to some very smart enemy designs that are plagued with distinct telegraphing. Because of this that you can take on overlevelled robotic threats way earlier than you should and, through determination and careful study, you can overcome them. I wish there was more variety to the actual design of the bad guys though, because for very long stretches of time you’re simply up against dudes in exo-suits. Once you figure out how to handle each one (their weapon is an immediate indicator of exactly how they’ll fight) they’re a bit boring to overcome. Despite being ‘easy’, this tedium can result in some incredibly frustrating deaths if you start underestimating the weaker enemies. They can still pack a serious punch and land combos that can one-hit you.