Reviews
[Review] ‘The Surge 2’ is a Confident and Violent Sci-Fi Action RPG With Some Minor Malfunctions
One thing’s for sure very early on in The Surge 2. It’s far, far better than its predecessor on so many levels. The real question is if it can go beyond that and be a great game. Let it be known that a bloody good try has been had.
The original game, by developer Deck 13, was an unashamed Dark Souls-like action adventure that had two things going for it. A sci-fi setting featuring cybernetically-enhanced protagonist and enemies was one thing, but its interesting limb-targeting system was the thing that really made it stand out. It’s not like the rest of the game did so, with painfully ordinary visuals and a blander-than bland itself setting that saw you essentially move through an infinite hardware warehouse.
The Surge 2 kicks off after the events of the first game (if you can remember them) and starts in a Police Department medical bay as something murders all and sundry, and the prisoners run riot. By the time you destroy your first cybernetic boss and head outside, you’ve already seen more variety in the opening 45 minutes than the first game had in its entirety.
You play as the survivor of a plane crash who wakes up in the aforementioned medical bay, You fight off prisoners and police alike with your overpowered fists, and try your damndest to find an exit. Inadvertently helping you is a large robotic beast, rampaging through the building and making doors out of walls. The enemies up to this point are weak and rather human bar the drone robots, but so are you, so the playing field is somewhat level. That is until you’re tasked with finding your first rig, a cybernetic framework for your fleshy body.
This ends with your first boss fight. Your opponent is a security officer clad in his own rig (that you’re out to get a piece of). Whereas the game has been gently ushering you forward before, showing you the controls in small bites, you’re now tasked with taking all you’ve learned (and unlearned if you’re a regular with games like this) and pass your first test. It’s not a tough one, but it’s just enough to spark your interest in how The Surge 2 can play, and there are moments like this peppered quite regularly throughout the opening hours. It’s not especially revelatory, but you begin to understand just how much of a leap this is from the largely bland original.
The limb-targeting combat is tricky to use at first, but once it clicks, it becomes second nature. It adds a different kind of strategy to fights. weak spots are very specific. Take that first boss. His weakness is in his head, so whilst targetting him, you flick the right stick up to select his head as a specific target. Limbs have their own smaller health bar, and by wearing it down, you can perform a lethal contextual strike which almost always results in a severed body part. It’s not always a practical way to approach a fight so the grisly death scenes don’t get burned out from overuse. Instead, they feel like a little treat for smart combat work.
The directional targeting works in a defensive manner as well, with certain enemy attacks able to be nullified by blocking and pushing the right stick in the correct direction. Again, it’s a weird thing to get used to, but it’s ultimately rewarding to get to grips with.
You can find a variety of weapon types out in Jericho City (in most cases, ripped off your enemies bodies) that suit various play styles, from heavy-hitting sledgehammer types that melt enemies to spark-fizzing clubs, and nanotech-infused blades. All of these and your own cybernetic equipment are upgradable by collecting scrap and components, while the overall health, stamina, and battery of the player character are also able to be upgraded by funneling your tech scrap into leveling up.
The battery plays an important part in your arsenal. it holds several charges and is filled by stringing combos together. When your health gets low, you can use up one of those charges to heal yourself, and that’s generally what you have to do if you want to survive. Battery charge doesn’t stay around for long, but you can store heals for later if needed. It encourages aggressive play, as sitting back taking potshots with your drone can only do so much (and ammo is limited). You need to get stuck in, risk taking a hit or two. It’s a significant reason why The Surge 2’s combat is so enjoyable.
By the time I reached the later hours of the game and having to fend off multiple dangerous foes, the systems are so ingrained that it feels close to effortless when I switched between targets and their individual limbs, picking off stragglers with my personal turret and speed-dodging frighteningly fast attacks. This turns out to be an easier feat than taking on some particular bosses, which is more of a failure of balance regarding certain boss fights than a criticism of the combat.
After that escape from the Police Department, the big city opens up for the first time, and that familiar tingle of excitement grows from just thinking about all the possible exploration of its nooks and crannies. Jericho City is The Surge 2‘s sci-fi dystopia, and it has a familiar crumbling warzone look, and that means it lacks a bit of originality, but it’s an intriguing labyrinth to work your way through. Jericho City is functional, but it’s fair to say the inmates have taken over this particular asylum, with pockets of relative safety acting as a breather and a reward for the tough challenges faced along the way.
The Surge‘s version of bonfires are suit upgrade stations. From here you can do your upgrading, restore your health and even buy some new items. There are also hub areas where you can talk to traders, accept side missions, and generally take a break from the limb-flaying action. It’s these hub areas where the majority of the game’s story is told.
While the main story carries on from the first game, it’s not essential that you played it first. The Surge 2 lets its main threads dangle in the foreground without much in the way of subtlety, but the smaller, personal stories you find in side quests do help to flesh out this broken world of metal and concrete. It’s not the most memorable tale you’ll play through this year, but it adds a bit of seasoning to Jericho City’s own story.
What doesn’t make the stay in Jericho City so pleasant is the difficulty spikes. For the most part, The Surge 2 is a fair mistress, giving you visual and audio cues for enemy attack patterns, but when the boss fights kick in, that isn’t always enough help. While the player character is pretty swift on their feet, there’s a slight fumbling to complete animations, and that can see you caught out more often than not, and against bosses that is utterly devastating. It’s the only time it feels like you’re fighting the controls, and in turn, it makes certain boss battles appear cheap and unfair. In fairness, it never gets to the maddening hysteria of say, Sekiro’s boss fights, but where those just felt humbling, these can just feel like an unnecessary blockage.
the only other significant gripe I can point at is the slightly uneven graphical presentation. Jericho City is well designed, but the character models and textures are far more hit and miss. Look out onto the sprawl of the city and it’s undeniably impressive. look at the enemies, NPC’s and even the player character and it’s far less inspiring. They often look low-res and grubby, which detracts from some good design work. The more robotic enemy types fare better, and also tend to have a bit more imagination to their look. The Surge 2 isn’t much of a looker overall, rather it shows some beauty underneath layers of grime and machine oil.
These are still pretty minor grievances because all The Surge 2 really needed to do to be an improvement was to be a bit more interesting, and it’s definitely that. Refined combat, an intriguing and varied place to explore, and just more variety, in general, are huge contributors to The Surge 2‘s success as a hardcore action RPG and as a sequel. It’s not ripping up any rulebooks or striking out with all that much fresh ambition, but it is a supremely confident followup to a bang average game.
The Surge 2 review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
The Surge 2 is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Books
‘Scary Movie Night’ Review: A Hitchcock-Themed Thriller Full of Juicy Twists But Not Much Else
A secluded mansion. A group of friends each harboring secrets. A party built around one woman’s love of Alfred Hitchcock. These are the ingredients laid out to begin Scary Movie Night, the sophomore novel from Miranda Smith and follow-up to her breakout debut, Smile for the Cameras.
They’re all, standing alone and taken together, very promising ingredients, and when Smith starts to bounce all those secrets and all that seclusion around with a little murder in the mix, they make for some juicy plotting. But fun twists and macabre themed party nights do not a thriller make. There is fun to be had here, but for all its reliance on classic horror tropes and the films of a master of cinematic suspense, Scary Movie Night never quite finds a way to become something more.
Movie blogger and influencer Tippi (yes, she’s named for Tippi Hedren from The Birds) is going through a rough patch. Her upcoming marriage was just called off, and she’s planning to hit the Cannes Film Festival then travel the world as a newly single woman, even shifting her career focus from movies to travel in the process. Her friends Ava, Marlowe, and Constance are supportive, but they also know it might be the last time they see Tippi for a while, so master party planner Ava comes up with the perfect sendoff: A themed scary movie night party, complete with costumes, hosted at the elegant estate of Tippi’s grandmother, Marmee.
Marmee, you see, has her own history with the glamour of Hollywood, and even has a private cinema set up in her mansion. It’s the perfect venue for the perfect night, at least until Tippi starts receiving vaguely threatening notes from her ex, and the first body turns up.
See what I mean about all the ingredients being there? This book starts with so much promise, particularly when guests turn up for the party and reveal their various movie costumes. There’s so much to chew on, and Smith wastes no time diving directly into the drama of it all. The book moves primarily through Tippi’s first-person perspective, so we get the lowdown on her friends, their various relationships, the quarrels that have defined previous social interactions, and much more. It’s a series of rich veins all tapped at once, and it feels like the book is genuinely going somewhere quite fun.
Here’s the thing: The book does go somewhere quite fun; it just gets there in a way that I found both frustrating and often unfulfilling. The characters aren’t defined by their choices in the book so much as they’re defined by what Tippi tells us about each of them, and while the notion of Tippi as an unreliable narrator is key to the plot, her supporting cast never really gets a chance to sit up and exist as anything other than archetypes in her head. The dialogue doesn’t help matters in this regard, and I kept finding myself wishing one of Tippi’s friends would just seize the narrative, just for a moment, so I’d get some sense of these people beyond the broad brushstrokes of the protagonist.
Which brings us to the issue of Tippi as the narrator in the first place. Like the Hitchcock blondes on which she’s clearly modeled, we’re meant to learn about her through her choices, and constantly question whether or not she’s made the right ones. Why did she leave her ex with a wedding looming? Why is she changing career paths? Why does she have to be talked into her own going-away party? How she reacts to these things, and what she’s really after, will be what defines her, but here’s the thing: Tippi, for all her Hitchcockian layers of plotting, never steps forward as a fully formed character. Like the Hitch films playing in the background during the party, she’s more like a suggestion of a character than a person.
Writing first-person present-tense is tricky under the best of circumstances, but doing it when your protagonist is meant to be harboring secrets of her own is especially challenging, and it just…never quite entirely works here, and drawing very direct parallels between her and Hitchcock’s various leading ladies doesn’t really help matters.
But here’s the really interesting part: I wouldn’t be invested in any of these issues were it not for a story that genuinely kept me reading. For all of this book’s shortcomings, and I found a few, it ultimately holds together because Smith has a genuine gift for plot twists, and secrets, and the kind of juicy drama that makes a thriller keep barreling forward on the page. There’s good stuff in here, even if it’s sometimes overshadowed by missteps, and that means that while Scary Movie Night might not obsess you or give you nightmares or stick in your head for weeks on end, it will entertain you. I wanted more from this book, but I also want to see what Miranda Smith writes next, and that’s an achievement in itself.
Scary Movie Night is available July 14 wherever books are sold.
You must be logged in to post a comment.