After three entries in the series, FromSoftware has seemingly moved on from the Dark Souls franchise. This year we saw the release of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which while similar in terms of scope and world design, was altogether a very different game. Its next title, Elden Ring, looks to be a return to a fantasy setting, but it still seems like it's going to be an entirely new concept rather than a complete return to form. But while FromSoftware looks to be out of the Souls business, there's a whole bunch of us who still want to stab big bosses and collect stuff to pump into our various stats.
The Surge 2 is the latest on the list of wannabe Souls games, and while you're likely not going to get lost in the lore of this technology-ravaged world, it should at least scratch that Souls-like itch.
Not Exactly A Warm Welcome
The story of The Surge 2 picks up after the events of the first game, where a horrible techno-virus has been unleashed upon the world. The game begins on an airplane just as things are getting pretty dang terrible, and sure enough, you crash land in the middle of Jericho City. You wake up two months later, and it turns out that after the crash, the whole city was quarantined from the rest of the world in order to prevent the spread of the nano-machine-fueled infection. There's also a mysterious little girl that survived the wreckage of the exact same plane, who has some kind of powerful connection to all this madness. So, as the hero of this story, you find yourself a weapon and a mechanical exoskeleton known as a Rig, and then proceed to chop and slice your way through everyone in order to get answers and find a way out of Jericho City.
It's a much better story than the one told in The Surge, but it's not necessarily a good story in and of itself. However, this is a Souls-like, and while the Dark Souls games featured some pretty juicy bits of lore, the overarching story never really mattered that much. It's always just been a backdrop for all the murder and mayhem, so not having a compelling narrative here isn't going to ruin the experience. I do wish the world was a little more interesting though, as it's mostly just your standard dystopian, post-apocalyptic, ruined city for you to fight your way through.
There were some surprising bits of humor scattered across the game that helps make The Surge 2 stand out from the other games that are trying to eat FromSoftware's lunch. There are some amusing audio-logs, including one that explains how people are able to be recorded at all times, and the legal ramifications of listening to those recordings. There are also just some weird moments, like when the super-serious apostle of Jericho City's techno-cult tells you to find their leader, who happens to be in a building directly under a giant, inflatable octopus. I kind of wish the game had just been completely off-the-wall zany, as it would have made it stand out more, but it still tries to tell a standard sci-fi story while shoving in the wacky bits. Which is a shame, because the main plot is pretty generic.
It Slices! It Dices!
The real draw of The Surge 2 is definitely the combat, which is thankfully quite good. The third-person combat is fast-paced, feels great, and it does a few unique things that give it a slightly more original vibe.
For example, you don't just lock-on to your enemies in order to beat them up. You actually have the option of targeting individual body parts in order to take them down. If someone's got heavier armor on their legs, you could attack their head or arms where they're less protected. The other cool part of this system is that once you've fully weakened these specific body parts, you can then chop them off and execute your opponent.
By doing so, you can sometimes grab the piece of armor they were wearing there, or maybe the weapon they were using. So, if you wanted to get a new helmet, you could aim for someone's head, slice it off, and then hopefully gain the schematic to craft that piece for yourself. It's a really fun and violent system, as it gives you a reason to focus your attacks, rather than just hack-and-slack the bad guys (although you can do that too).
The Surge 2 also reinterprets the standard Souls-like elements in its own ways. You have a Bonfire, only here it's a Medbay, which basically looks like a cross between a torture device, and a vending machine. You strap yourself in, and can then use the Scrap (your Souls equivalent) to level up your health, stamina, or battery (which allows you to use your healing abilities), craft new gear, or upgrade existing gear. You do have an energy meter attached to your level, which determines how much gear you can equip, so you can't really just slap everything on right away.
You drop your Scrap when you die, but here you have a timer that appears at the top of your screen. If you don't pick up your stuff before that timer runs out, you lose it, which creates some tension and a sense of urgency. It can be a little annoying if you died in a really out of the way location, but you get more time by killing enemies, so it's manageable. There's also a ton of shortcuts available in the game, and usually, you'll end finding an easy route back to the nearest Medbay by just traversing through the area.
The Apocalypse Is Only Part Of Jericho City's Problems
Jericho City is a little nicer than a lot of the other dilapidated cities you find in these kinds of science fiction tales. There's a little more color than usual, and there are some nice forest spaces that actually look pretty beautiful, except for all the carnage. However, a lot of places are just smoking wrecks, and start to blend together after a while. The enemy design is also pretty bland for the most part. Some of the bigger, mechanical monsters are neat, but the average grunt is usually just a dude covered in metal wielding a weapon that resembles a giant electric fly swatter.
There's a fair amount of glitches and bugs that popped up during my playthrough. The execution animations would get pretty janky depending on where they were performed, and enemies would occasionally get stuck on certain parts of the scenery. I also had a few moments where I was fighting someone, and suddenly I'd fall through the floor, and get a little disorientated. Combined with that, there were occasional frame-rate hitches, and it did crash on me once or twice. Fortunately, the worst bugs were pretty rare, and I didn't feel like anything that happened was a game-breaking issue.
Not Quite Souls, But It'll Do
The Surge 2 won't replace any of the Souls games in the hearts of fans, but it does a fine job of giving players a little bit more of the action they've likely been craving since FromSoftware shifted their attention away from the series. The story and world won't compare to anything contained within Lothric, but Jericho City is nicer than most dystopias, and the odd joke here and there helps to make the game stand out from the other grimdark titles.
Deck13 Interactive has done a pretty good job here, and if you really need to get your FromSoftware kick, and you can't wait for Elden Ring to come out, then The Surge 2 should be able to satisfy your hunger for just a little while.
3.5 Out Of 5 Stars
A PC copy of The Surge 2 was provided to TheGamer for this review. The Surge 2 is now available on PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.
