The Surge 2

The Surge 2 turned out to be an amazing souls like slasher game. At first, I was struggling a lot with the mechanics, the directional parry system (KMB user) and once I got to the second boss of the game which is like the "skill check" it blew my mind how hard and confused I was. But after a few practices, after understanding it; the game felt sooooooo damn cool to play. Slicing, chopping, combos, parry (yes, you NEED to parry a lot here, and it is timing + directional attack you are facing) it is so good that I forgot how BAD the story is hahaha, because yeah! after the end I was like "Oh wow, these characters suck HAHAHA" (Few memorable tho)

Devs do not Lie when they say that the game is hardcore combat, because of all souls / souls-like i've played so far, this one takes the cake with the tactical. One boss took me so much time because I was not paying attention to what to hit, instead i was like "durr durr me bong durr durr".

At the very start I had my doubts, but this turned into a great sequel to the first game.
The combat is super satisfying, and the weapon and armor options are enormous.
Both the first game and this one ended up becoming some of my favorites in the genre.

I did not play the first part but The Surge 2 was a lot of fun to me, one of the best souls likes I have played so far. Cuting of the armor part from enemies and being able to equip them keeps motivating to finish every damn opponent that steps in your way. Can honestly recommend, have fun!

I love these games, both of em can't recommend it enough. But if you don't own some kind of controller GO BUY ONE BEFORE YOU BUY THIS GAME. Try playing it with mouse and keyboard, and you'd prefer eating glass and drywall screws to playing this game. But on controller, great game.

迸卫兵跟魂卫兵可以打一架决定本作是不是类魂。2代累计的原创机制和设计已经远超黑魂。后劲比较大，可复玩性高。

Top 3 Soulslike

Surge 2 didn't feel as deep as the 1st installment, but it was still an incredibly enjoyable experience. If you enjoy souls-like games and/or cyberpunk - I'd recommend giving The Surge and The Surge 2 a shot.

Awesome

I think I would like it better if there was more of an indication on where to go, and no I am not talking about a map or anything like that....but in some zones everything looks the same. There is no real way for me to gather my surroundings to say ok, this is a new place or a different place. Where I am stuck, where you disable the PAX with the electric mine dump and there is toxic waste everywhere. I did find a new area for underground under a dam but it required an attachment for zipline.... after running around for awhile and falling into water that I thought was platforms and running into multiple level 3's that would demolish me. I just said F* it. I don't want to have to look it up, I should have some kind of environmental indicator that I need to go a particular direction. I beat the first one, it had more linear map design with shortcut unlocks and some indication that I was in different territory and it had way finding....maybe way finding would of benefited the second.

For a AA souls-like this game is pretty good.

Personally I felt a bit let down.
I enjoyed the first game a lot, but it had many shortcomings. Shortcomings I overlooked, because the studio is of smaller size compared to others, and I assumed they would be improved on in the second game. Don't get me wrong, they did improve many things. Combat is very good, there's a nice variety of gear and weapons, and thus playstyles.
But I went in hoping for more enemy variety and bosses. Similar to the first game, there's not a lot of it. Also some of the player animations are just goofy, which I was hoping they'd have improved. E.g. single-rigged or heavy duty weapons.

Storywise, the finale of the first game has huge implications in regard to nanites and the fate of the world, whereas the second game starts off very tame. Yeah nanites are a thing and they are spreading, but it's still just mostly humans lootin' and murderin'. 90% of the game you just fight humans (with different weapons/movesets and gear to be fair).
I went in with the expectation that apocalypse was on full display, whereas here it is contained in a small part of a city.

I thought the story in the first game was excellent, about the implications of an unchecked company just unleashing dangerous tech without regard for the risks, showing that the ends don't justify the means.
Second game story is like "ok it's unleashed, but well it was all about humans and their emotions anyways!".
Personally I'm not a fan of sci-fi games/movies about technologies beyond our understanding suddenly pivoting into "OuR lOvE iS tHe OnLy ThInG tHaT cAn SaVe Us". Yes I'm not a fan of interstellar's ending, how did you know.

Still, I think Deck13 has the "sauce". There are so many quality of life things in this game, that other high budget games don't have. The few cutscenes the game has are great. The stories are overall very intriguing. The level design is most of the time excellent (fuck the power plant though). Combat is original and fun. There's fun stuff and jokes hidden in small details.

Overall I enjoy their games very much and I just wish there was more "meat on the bone". You can see small glimmers of greatness in their games, they are just not quite there.

Not as good as the 1st game, but still pretty good. Things it excels at: gameplay and weapon variety.

Holy Shit was a piece of garbage. The first 10 minutes pits you up against a guy that kills you in 3 hits with no instruction on how to counter it or handle it.

dope game

Pretty good game

Not my favorite, but I think it's good enough as a soulslike game. Yeah, it's worth to try I think, just give it a shot and feel it your self

Fun

quest bugged at aid command center unable to progress even after having guttenbergs card disapointed

Fun game, an improvement over the first one in terms of gameplay but it could be better performance wise, it looks identical to the first one while being harder to run, the game stutters a lot if you don't cap the fps and it has some kind of memory issue with the gpu almost using all my vram regardless of the graphics settings, although you can probably brute force these issues with a stronger pc, mine's a little old. Over all i think is worth buying on sale :)

A brutal symphony of carnage

Unplayable , entire screen is grayed out from char creation to in game , drivers are updated and verified the files and restarted the sys but still not working. Unable to find a solution online too.

⭐9.0/10

No issues with the first game. Horrible performance issues here. Tons of suggested solutions, some worked passably well, none worked well enough (or were permanent enough) for me to justify playing this.

Played the hell outta of it for a good 27 hours. had my fun until i reached NG+. Just for the dread of knowing they haven't made a update since 2020, not worth getting for long term fun, but good passable enough for a janky good time; wouldn't recommend tho

Have only played a couple of hours at this point my view so far
Graphics sub par compared to the first Surge game.
No character voice lines
cut scenes are not cgi'd as well either

Combat is a little more arcady which makes it more player friendly
break down of what gear offers is more understandable.

Will play until i have completed all the campaigns but i feel like they should have expanded on the first game rather then making a new one with worse graphics.

Just wait for good Soulslikes to come out.

I finished the Surge 1 and 2, Surge 1 is better for me

I'm not someone who normally blocks in Souls-likes, but apparently the devs at Deck13 keep their fingers firmly placed on the block button, because in both Surges and LotF they keep insisting on a particular playstyle. It all kind of feels like an antitheses to what these sorts of games are supposed to be like.

There are a few nitpicks I have vs the first game. First being that the directional block mechanic has an "implant" to tell you when to block and in what direction. Having a perfect block was enough, and the directional aspect basically makes the implant mandatory unless you play a LOT of hours. The second is that unlike the first game you can't change your clothes. Not a huge deal but it does make some sets look awesome and others just silly. The final aspect I have issue with is how weapon drops are handled, two drone weapons you have ONE chance to get per play-through, and one of them isn't even hinted at existing. You almost are required to know of it's existence to get. Nanite weapons make sense in context of why you get them where you do, but basically are just given to you by the game in a way that kinda feels insulting to use at that point. The final is the DLC weapons are just weirdly scattered, but one of the best weapons that almost breaks the game can be gotten very early on.

Overall the game however is better in most regards than it's previous. The world is bigger, the fights are fun, you have more armor sets for playstyle choices, and armors can completely change how you play, hence why not getting a drone weapon is a big deal. Unlike the first game the drone really can be a part of your playstyle this time around. Overall if you liked the first game I would say this one is worth your time. If you haven't played the first game I would still say this is worth your time if you like souls like games. Especially on a sale, and if you want more sci fi for your souls experience.

One of the most entertaining souls-like i've ever played. Better than it's predecesor, Surge 2 delivers a strong fight mechanic, a beautiful setting and the thrill of finding out what the heck is happening. NG+ makes it even better.

fun stuff

its nice

what is the worst than bad game? the unplayable one, i love surge one but somehow i got eror when try to launch the game it said FLR eror even there is no fix on internet too coz of vulkan API shyit, what a mess.

Absolutely loved the first game, short and sweet and a pretty unique take on the souls like genre. This one is just not it. Random extreme difficulty spikes which force you to play in a specific way which kind of removes the whole "hard but fair" attraction to these kinds of games.

Sci-Fi-Souls, still torture...
...or even AI-generated Souls.

The redundancy of dying and respawning only to fight through the same enemies over and over again quickly makes this a torturous experience. The promise of colorful fun is like sugar on poison. Don't play this game. It is a can a console crap that rots the mind. It promotes by way of mental anguish: school shootings, driving cars through malls, and slitting wrists.
This is a console game that might have been playable with the lock on and button smashing being enough, but it gets in the way here.

Still one of the best souls-likes along with The Surge

If you love dying a lot and have patience, give it a go. A lot of builds and weapons to craft. Writing this while i have died 500 times already.

Its amazing

I LOVE THE SURGE

Another solid early soulslike with a dismemberment system, directional parries and more!

Disclaimer

I finished the game once.

TL;DR

Technically a better game than The Surge 1, but also much worse in pacing and overstays its welcome by a lot. Both games are equally janky. Buy on a sale if it looks interesting to you but it's not a great game, at most it's okay.

Description

I won't recount mechanics of The Surge 1, I've described them in the review for the original. The new mechanic is a directional parry system. It's jank and makes 0 sense how some attacks look unblockable, but are, while others look to be from a certain direction, but are from a different one. There's a special implant you can equip that shows you a direction of an incoming attack and parry timing, so you can use that, I guess. I mostly played through the game without using this mechanic because it's slow and boring, relying on dodge instead was more fun to me. There was 1 boss that pretty much demanded usage of parry and that's about it.

Story is nonsense, a bunch of religious freaks worship the nanomachines and try to become one or something, I don't know, I don't care.

Pros:

+ First half of the game
It's actually good. A fun exploration and challenging combat as well as The Surge's unique dismemberment mechanic makes it fun and rewarding to actually play and farm for parts and upgrade your character.

+ Lots of parts
I didn't find a single interesting one-handed weapon, which was a problem because I played using that type almost exclusively, but if you are a fan of other types then there's a lot to choose from, and a bunch of elemental options too.

Cons:

- Too long
Second part of the game makes you retread and re-explore things you already saw, but not with a bunch of passages blocked off, forcing you to use some new unlocked passages, but this feels artificially constraining and not engaging at all. There's suddenly a lot of big enemy groups instead of giving you actual interesting encounters to fight through, so the game becomes a slog.

- Story
All characters are awful and boring, religion angle is overplayed and dumb.

- Many minor issues
Camera sucks a. I died many times due to how I get blocked on random piece of scenery and an enemy keeps me stunlocked.

Some enemies are just badly designed, being far too aggressive and having attack hurtboxes completely disjointed from their actual attack animations (like the tri-legged big drone's flip, which was just as broken in the first game, so there's no excuse to still have it be this bad).

Implant menu isn't fit for purpose in it's current form, having eaech implant being a colorful icon that barely gives you any idea of what it actually does is annoying when you want to find something specific and implants is the one thing you cannot put favorites in (you can favorite weapons and drone modules for example).

Areas have confusing layouts that don't feel fun to explore, mostly starting to happen around halfway point.

Near the end of the game there's a random medbay (rest area) around a large group of enemies. That is - it's right next to them. If you rest there, they will respawn and prevent you from resting again until you kill all of them, and while 1 by 1 they are easy - the whole group is designed to really mess you up with slows, dot's, damage areas, etc. On the other side of same area there's a shortcut to the starting point where there is also a medbay. But what's even better - activating that shortcut will make that big enemy group not respawn anymore! So if you go to the medbay in the front - you are screwing yourself over with an annoying fight every time you want to leave, but if you go other direction - the entire area is fixed. It's such a dumb design decision - why even have that medbay there? To bait people? The game should do a better job directing the player to the shortcut and not have that forward medbay at all, or have it placed right before the end boss.

Lowdown

The best thing I liked about this game is I liked when it was finally over and I didn't have to play it anymore. The start is fun, the end is not.

I'd give The Surge 2 a

5/10

Mediocre, only buy on a sale if it looks interesting to you.

I've never really played many souls-like games before as I'm not a fan of that genre, but I am a huge fan of post-apocalyptic mega-corporation industrial-hell sci-fi types of games, so when I saw The Surge 1 & 2 pack on sale, I had to give it a try. The first Surge tickled all the right neurons in my brain, so naturally I had to give The Surge 2 a chance too, despite the theme being quite different from the first one.

I am personally not as much impressed with The Surge 2 as I was with the first one, but on the other hand it does improve certain things.

My biggest praise for the first one was the incredible level design, which unfortunately does not hold up in this one. While the first game was mostly about staying in one level for a very long time before moving on to the next one (with the added freedom of backtracking), this one is more like an open world where you constantly have to move between different locations. That means you are going to see loading screens way more frequently. There are also certain locations that you enter (loading screen) only to find out that you can't really make any progress there at all because you lack a certain tool or ability and have no choice but to go back (another loading screen). The level design is overall much more frustrating and confusing.

Now the sequel does improve many gameplay aspects. You can now change all implants at any point and the injectables got reworked in a way that makes more sense. The enemies show their level, making it clear what tier items they are going to drop. The combat got fleshed out a bit and drones can do more stuff than before. I'm definitely going to miss these improvements when I return to the first game to finish all the achievements.

To me this is like 8/10, not as good as I'd hope for, but still worth playing.

Rating:
★★✮☆☆ (2.5/5) stars

Review:
The surge 2 takes the ideas and problems of its predecessor and improves, but also worsens certain aspects. The surge 2 loses its sense of grounding that the first game had, ditching slower punishing combat for a faster pace that the character, conveniently still seems to be built for the original slower pace. The world, weapons, and armor are greatly expanded which is nice, although most of it is completely reused with no update or some nano status attached. The story gets less coherent than the first game and it feels like half the bosses in the game are an upgraded version of a boss you fought previously. Combat remains solid but imbalanced. The largest issues from the surge 1 were enemy placement and map design. The surge 2 takes these and make them 10x worse. Most of the game enemy placements always feel like an ambush and certain enemies feel designed around this entire idea. Map design was tough in the surge 1 but in the surge 2 there were multiple instances I had to look up where to go because I absolutely could not figure out where to go or how to navigate the confusing maze it feels like every region produces.

All in all the surge 2 is an expanded scope of the surge 1 at the cost of some of the ideas the surge 1 gets right. It feels heavily lazily designed. I enjoyed the surge 1 more, but this game is still playable with a unique style.

I love this game serie so much and really hope they are secretly working on the third game and bring back Warren as the main character following his departure from Jericho City and finally ending it all.

oh no it crashed!

the Best

good game. shit level design.

Good

Crashes 4/5 times I try playing it

If you never played the first game, you're perfectly welcome to jump in here.

Overall this game feels a lot more balanced than the first game, although I feel the story is a little bit weaker. The combat scenarios feel well thought through, and the hubs are fun bits of respite from the action. Also the variety of environments is a nice change of pace.