My first memorable interaction with a Deck13 game was back when I’d just got my Xbox One, and it wasn’t part of some console bundle or even a game that hit the market at half the going AAA price tag at the time. Instead, it was a game I’d been keeping my eye on over the proceeding year as the studio wrapped up development, and one that I bought as soon as it was on the shelves – not because it was something super special, mind you, but because I love Dark Souls, and wanted more of the same, but different (… but the same).
That’s how I ended up with Lords of the Fallen, the game almost put me off Deck13 games forever.
It was a buggy mess, and on Xbox One, with all the performance issues you’d typically associate with a final year project of a distinctly average varsity student. Bad (like, really bad) frame rate, janky controls, and just completely underwhelming in every other aspect. Thanks Deck13, I hate it.
A couple of years later, however, the studio launched The Surge, another entry into the Souls-’em-up genre that was significantly better by virtually every conceivable metric, and I absolutely loved it. So, I was genuinely hyped to get my hands on The Surge 2.
The Surge 2, sadly, doesn’t take the same monolithic steps in the right direction from its predecessor as The Surge took from Lords of the Fallen. It’s taken steps, and in the right direction, I just wouldn’t describe them as “monolithic”. Or even “kind of big”. More like “adequate but that’s okay”.
The CREO complex featured in the original game was an enormous, intricate industrial site in a sorry state of disrepair and almost total collapse, and as a game setting goes I felt it was evocative and unique. The Surge 2 relocates things from CREO and slips our protagonist (one of your choosing this time, with a handful of customisation options to give you the illusion of choice) into the neon-futuristic cyberpunk Jericho City.
Quite a lot has happened since the events of the first game too. The rogue process you battled so hard to shut down in The Surge is gone, but the nanites – the real bad guys – survived, and wrecked Jericho City hard. So hard, in fact, that the powers that be decided it was a good idea to build a wall that Donald Trump would be proud of around the entire city to try to contain the malicious micro-robo-bros. Throughout my time in this city I got to meet some interesting people, ones that have found power in the void left by any form of law enforcement. You’ll need to deal with them in one way or another, be it helping a weird cult, rescuing stragglers, or pestering the aid workers who are supposedly there to rescue survivors. Supposedly.
Performance wise, playing The Surge 2 on my Xbox One X was consistently awesome. With 60fps-splendour-at-1080p and 4K-at-any-and-every-expense-but-locked-at-30fps graphics options to choose between, you can decide how this game plays out from a visual perspective.
Many of the mechanics from the first game make a comeback, which pleases me – things like banking your scrap at med bays, slicing off enemy appendages to loot a desired weapon or piece of armour, mixing and matching said armour to give you the build you want. Some of these have been improved on, like how mods work, how the slots unlock, and an overhauled crafting system that now lets you amass a huge collection of gear in almost no time at all. And other things haven’t changed at all, like the lack of a fast travel system and the shitty map.
And while all of this seems to still come together quite nicely, there are major balancing issues that still need to be sorted out. If you know what you’re doing, for example, you can assemble a build in the first hour that will comfortably see you through the entire game and still be pretty overpowered by the end (with the help of upgrades). There are also five different weapon types in the game now, with a variety of different weapons in each category, and each category with its own, unique combat style, and working out which style worked for me provided most of the endorphin rushes I got from the game.
[This review missed its deadline by, like, six weeks, because Gareth forgot to enable auto-save in MS Word and the document was wiped in a tragic system crash. It’s taken him until now to recover from the existential crisis. What a noob. – Editorix]