![]() The Surge presents you with implants that have either passive or active buffs, and you can mix and match them at will as long as you have the energy to power them. ![]() You can use items to re-roll but it's kind of a pain. Everyone knows the pain of playing through a Dark Souls game, increasing a stat for 15 hours only to find the perfect sword. Similarly I love the skills system in the form of implants that you can slot in and out at will. The energy meter you gain through consecutive attacks adds that one extra layer of strategy to combat encounters in addition to simply managing your stamina which makes a world of difference. Each encounter is a little different because enemies will have different weak spots and depending on the situation you might want to go for a faster kill or you might want to prolong the fight a bit to gain energy so you can engage a heal. Very rarely was I ever just mashing my pneumatic drill at an enemy. Not only does it look cool, but it helps the combat not get stale. This system where you cut off the limbs of your enemies in order to get the gear they are wearing is extremely fun. Then of course there is the dismemberment. I even enjoyed the corporate PR you constantly encounter throughout the game, with a future Mark Zuckerberg letting you know how great Creo (the fictional corporation you work for) is both for you and for the world around you - without getting into spoilers you do get to meet this man and it's a really interesting encounter. ![]() Your abilities are implants that draw power from your suit. You're using a welding device attached to your exo-rig which increases your strength and speed so that you can work at an assembly line better. You're not walking through ruined castles or bogs, you're in the R&D department of a corporation where gross experiments were taking place. Ironically it helps to ground the experience in some sort of reality which in a way helps you relate to whats going on around you. Being in the future means that a lot of the things that were typically just fantasy magic mumbo jumbo all of a sudden have more or less logical explanations which actually goes a long way in increasing the immersion factor. More importantly it brought the Souls experience to a sci-fi setting which is very much my jam. ![]() What the Surge does is take this existing formula and much like Dead Space did with survival horror all those years ago, it adds new systems and evolves some of the already established mechanics. A big difference is that I am already a fan of the Souls games, and Bloodborne is probably my favorite one-of-those, so I didn't need to force myself outside of my comfort zone. A great game is just a great game, no matter what genre it occupies. Sure I still cringed at all the monster closets, but no longer was I repelled by having 2 bullets and slowly walking around, turning in place using tank controls and clumsily dispatching slow zombies. The amazing design and clever innovations in the already established survival horror genre were able to help me play this title that I would never give the time of day otherwise. ![]() I let him go at it and sat back watching - when he left that day after getting a few hours into it I knew that a) it looked amazing and b) I had to play it for myself. The game sat on my shelf for a while until a friend came over that wanted to play it. I vaguely recalled the advertising campaigns for Dead Space touting it had amazing sound design and was incredibly scary. Now I wasn't all that enthused - I don't like scary games and I enjoy survival horror even less. Anything was better than what I had (title of the game escapes me) and when I saw him the next day he handed me Dead Space which had just released at the time. Many years ago I remember getting a fairly bad game from GameStop and I knew someone working there so they told me they can exchange it for something else they had on hand at the moment. So I checked and it was on Game Pass - man I love Game Pass - so why not? A lot of advertisements had recently sprung up about The Surge 2 showcasing some gameplay videos and a cinematic trailer - even our very own Giant Bomb gave it a shot on a UPF or something a while back. It's the gaming drought and I've been looking for things to play. ![]()
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