55) The Surge (2017)

Seen as a spiritual successor to Deck13 Interactive's 2014 release, Lords of the the Fallen, and taking inspiration from the 1994 title, Rise of the Robots, The Surge is a refreshing sci-fi take on the Soulslike genre. Taking place in a dystopian future in which mankind has exhausted the world's resources, we take on the role of Warren, a wheelchair bound new employee of CREO, one of the largest tech conglomerates renowned for its revolutionary breakthroughs, such as advanced exoskeletons known as rigs. We begin the game taking a bullet train to the facility where we get to choose one of two different rigs that promise to give Warren the ability to walk again. After choosing a rig and being subjected to a very intrusive and graphic surgical procedure to graft the rig to our body, Warren passes out, only to awaken in a ruined facility overrun by drones and deranged "coworkers" who attack us on sight.

As we proceed through the ruined facility, we make contact with an executive known as Sally, who offers the bare minimum in terms of guidance. We're given next to no information about what has transpired, knowing only that some mysterious event has caused the machines to to malfunction and for the other augmented personnel to go insane and bloodthirsty. Thus, it falls to us to traverse the ruined facility to make our way to the Executive Forum to hopefully get answers.

Movement and exploration are a slow and lumbering affair, with a limited ability to run tied to our rig's level and power consumption. As we explore, we find numerous upgrades that can be installed at the cost of our suits power supply, which is the metric by which we level up. I genuinely like this, as it neatly explains our progress and increased abilities in a simple, concrete way. The game never bothers to explain how it is we get brought back if and when we die, but the fact that medbays are used as safe rooms to respawn meant I never thought too much about it. Speaking of dying, doing so means we drop our current load of tech scrap, the currency we use to level up. After reviving in the medbay, we get an onscreen indicator telling us the amount of tech scrap we dropped, its distance from us, and a timer for how long it will remain before disappearing. This is a brilliant way to encourage the player to memorize the routes they take and gives us a sense of urgency as we rush to recollect our load.

As the backbone of the genre, combat plays a vital role in our experience, and I found it impressive how diverse the developers made it. We can choose to wear either heavy or light armor, changing the way we move and how stable we are in combat, and we're presented with several offensive options that all feel distinct. I personally opted for the use of single-rigged weapons, which are large and move slow and predictably, offering decent stability and high damage. I was impressed with how easy it was to find the flow and rhythm in combat for any given weapon type.

More impressive, at least to me, was our defensive options. Regardless of weapon and armor type, we have the choice to either dodge, block, or simply tank attacks. As a person with a longstanding phobia of the block button in games, the ability to dodge was exceedingly satisfying. It made combat feel more like a dance, especially once you pick up on enemy attack patterns. Combat is given a further level of complexity with the ability to target specific body parts, with different enemies being armored on different parts of the body. It gives you the choice to either do more damage by going for an unarmored limb or to target a shielded area for the chance to perform a finisher. Performing a finisher on enemies slows things down, giving us an impressive display of dismembering our enemy with an increased chance of them dropping gear for the affected body part. It's yet another example of risk versus reward, which the game offers in spades.

As we proceed through the facility, we discover more about what happened and the secrets that CREO has tried to keep from the world. While all of this is interesting, the reliance on using audiologs to build the world and tell the story is an awkward crutch that means that players may not get the full picture. Worse still, the environments for much of the facility are repetitive, which makes it easy to get lost. While this makes a certain amount of sense, the lack of a map for the player compounds the issue. I find it odd that, among the various upgrades and modifications you can find to enhance Warren, there's never an option to add a map to the HUD. This would've been an easy thing to implement, and would offer yet another option for the player, choosing between either a map or a combat oriented modification.

There are two main DLCs available that players can access relatively early. They're integrated in a mostly organic way, which is always a pleasure to see. The first of which, A Walk in the Park, is a delightful trip to the CREO World theme park, which is obviously legally distinct from any real world park. In it, we face off against new enemies, including animatronic mascots that drop goofy looking loot we can wear. The environments on offer are more diverse, and a healthy dose of humor is added that's refreshing to see. We even have the chance to find audiologs of Warren discussing his desire to join CREO with his wife, which serves as a nice little bonus to the story.

The final DLC, the western themed The Good, The Bad, and The Augmented, is handled in a much different manner. We gain access to a special lab with an experimental program that allows us to enter a twisted version of a western show via a virtual simulation. This consists of different episodes in which we progress through a handful of extremely linear rooms that culminates in a boss fight. We're urged to play through each episode multiple times with different modifiers we unlock in order to gain access to the western themed loot. It's an odd choice that really boils down the Soulslike formula to its barest essence, but I found it to be more than a little disappointing, especially when compared to the previous DLC on offer.

On the whole, The Surge is a delightful sci-fi take on the genre that manages to set itself apart with a rich and satisfying combat experience. It stumbles a bit with the repetitive nature of the environments and the rather limited pool of enemies. The boss fights, while certainly impressive in scale, often times felt limiting in how we can approach them. Still, I found The Surge to be a ton of fun with a decent level of replayability and a tongue in cheek style of humor that certainly appealed to me.