The Surge

To be honest I did not enjoy playing this game as much as other souls-likes I played over the last few years. I've hardly seen everything it has to offer, but I really felt like stopping right after beating the final boss. I still wanted to review it though, if only to highlight what I did like. What I liked: - The horror atmosphere. It starts off with a feeling close to a zombie game's, with all humans being in a sort of brain-dead-kill-everything-in-sight state when you wake up, and it evolves into something closer to cosmic horror by the end. - Very good world-building and interesting story. The different areas of CREO all tell their stories thanks to an amazing amount of details in the environment, and you get to find a lot of logs that give you insight about what other people were doing before everything went wrong. I liked how the game introduces some key characters like Jonah or Don via in-game corporate advertisements. - Excellent level-design, with each area being connected to others in a believable way, and built around a single rest location and a lot of unlockable shortcuts. And unlocking those felt amazing every time, as it really meant being able to skip long enemy cleanup segments. - You can definitely beat a fair amount of bosses without taking a hit, although it is hard. And as soon as you know how to inflict damage to them, the fight can be over pretty fast. So a lot of them are like puzzles to solve, rather than endurance tests. They can be infuriating though. - You can store remaining tech scrap that you cannot spend on leveling-up. So even a little can stack over a couple tries against enemy groups, and you can make progress all the time. What I disliked: - Combat and movement in general. It unfortunately did not click for me. It felt clunky, with unpleasant feedback (even if you target weak spots, you very often hit metallic parts and it does not feel good). My inputs often felt unresponsive, with too long transitions between attack animations, and a lot of inertia, which took some time to get used to. You need to learn the combos for all the types of weapons you find, and get used to the fact that some attacks trigger two hits instead of one. I imagine the skill ceiling of the game might be pretty high still, as you are encouraged to mix vertical and horizontal hits to make sure that you always hit the body part you are targeting while the enemies are doing their own thing. - Although the idea of targeting specific limbs to collect upgrade materials is great in itself, as you do not have to hope RNG is generous to get new weapons or armor parts, it was not really fun for me to do. I grew tired of the slow-down dismembering kill animations pretty quickly. - Some enemies, especially non-humanoïd ones, have hard to read attack animations, where you need to learn a timing instead of visual flow. Whenever such an attack empties your health bar, it feels devastating. - Even if you open well-placed shortcuts, the runback to most bosses feels unnecessarily long, especially if you have to go through narrow corridors where an enemy cannot be avoided. If you've played souls-like games before and really want to try one set on a sci-fi stage, it's not that bad, and it has its merits (world-building, level-design, story). I would not recommend it at the time of writing otherwise, as its clunky combat can hinder the fun significantly.