Players begin The Surge 2 in a deliberately disorienting fashion. Your character, a plane crash survivor, has just awaken from a two-month-long coma. A voice in your head warns that “they’re” coming to kill you, and with the use of two nearby defibrillator paddles as a makeshift weapon, you must immediately fend off sentry drones. But for both better and worse, the mystery behind your circumstances is quickly revealed, as the game uses friendly civilians to explain that you’re in the dystopian mega-city of Jericho City and that a nanotech plague has led to a quarantine. You always know exactly where you’re supposed to go, and why, and though the city is somewhat open for exploration, high-level enemies and pathways that require specialized equipment serve to funnel you through each area.
Although its precisely timed counter-heavy combat and interconnected, shortcut-filled exploration borrow heavily from the Dark Souls playbook, The Surge 2 is otherwise a significantly more straightforward game. In addition to your objectives being clearly recorded in your logbook, your character can equip a wide variety of cybernetic implants that make combat easier. If you’re having trouble reading your opponents’ physical cues, you can utilize an augment that adds a directional arrow to your screen to show you exactly where attacks are coming from. And if you keep hitting the wrong limb on an enemy, severing its chest when you’re trying to salvage an arm, you can also install a chip for that.
Even the game’s loading screen is profoundly helpful, as it displays a tourist’s map to the various districts of Jericho City. Since this is the image that you’ll be staring at each time your character falls in battle, death essentially helps to reorient the player. You can absolutely still get lost in the game’s tense, rhythmic battles or Jericho City’s labyrinthine alleyways and ruinous buildings, but for the most part, The Surge 2 provides clear, meaningful goals and a series of constant, albeit small, achievements that help to alleviate the punishing difficulty.
It’s this sense of making incremental gains that makes The Surge 2 such a blast to play. As is standard for hardcore Dark Souls-like games, when you die you drop all of your currency—here called scrap—and have one chance to make it back from your respawn point to your death location to recollect it. But The Surge 2 goes even further than its predecessor in adding quality-of-life improvements that help mitigate the risks you take: You can bank unspent currency at any MedBay, safely storing it for later; you can unlock an abundance of shortcuts, which helps to cut down on unwanted backtracking; and, most importantly, you can always use the game’s gory, slow-motion limb-severing mechanic to harvest new tools from your enemies, which ensures that you’re always getting something from even old foes. Dying is less of a failure if it nets you a new weapon, or allows you to gather schematics and raw parts. If your current equipment isn’t doing the trick, it won’t take long for you to mix, match, and upgrade to a new set of helmets, chests, arms, and legs that better serve your playstyle.
The Surge 2 also has a lot more environmental variety than the original game. Jericho City is filled with encampments of human survivors, each of which reflects a very different sort of response to the nanotech disaster. For instance, entrepreneurs eke out a living in what remains of the Seaside Court mall, doctors attempt to feed and clothe children in the tented evacuation site that rests atop an abandoned highway, and a bunch of rich, well-connected socialites host a decadent End of the World party in the swanky bar of a high-rise hotel. In addition to the checkpointed city streets, which are occupied by overzealous, trigger-happy soldiers, the waterlogged district of Port Nixon has been overrun by a religious, machine-worshipping cult, and the nature preserve at Gideon’s Rock is filled with opportunistic stealth-suit-wearing mercenaries looking to score a quick bounty or two.
That said, for all of the work that Deck 13 has put into creating an intriguing city, the actual exploration is sometimes marred by technical issues. The game’s a graphical mess, with textures failing to load, and a general fuzziness to everything when in the lower-resolution Performance Mode. (Even the upgraded PlayStation 4 Pro has trouble smoothly handling the better visuals of Quality Mode.) Certain environments, like the neon-irradiated gloom of a power plant that’s been transformed into a church, have an ambient glare that makes it hard to clearly make out one’s character in combat. Others, like the nanite-infested sewer tunnels, are too dark, even with your exosuit’s lights on. Worst of all is the game’s errant collision detection; occasionally, your character will get stuck against a wall and instantly die.
The further into The Surge 2 players make it, the more abilities they gain for navigating the city: an EMP blast opens electronic locks and restarts magnetic lifts, a grappling hook allows glorified zip-lines to be rappelled up and down, and fast travel is enabled between the non-combat regions. Inversely, the easier it becomes to get around, the less the game asks you to do so. Dedicated players can wander off the blinkered path, but the sidequests are neither compelling nor rewarding enough to encourage this. The last act of the game is literally a molten path of destruction painted across the city that strongly urges players to proceed directly to their final destination. The Surge 2 offers a temporary jolt of entertainment, but after a dozen hours, it’s a desperate sprint to the end before it runs out of juice entirely.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Evolve PR.
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