The Surge 2

I was interested in The Surge when it came out, as a sci-fi Souls-like game sounded entertaining. That one just didn't quite reach the critical level of interest for me to buy and play, though. The sequel, being widely seen as an improvement in most ways, was an easy pick-up.

As one might guess from the genre label, it's very heavy on action combat. The zones like to twist and turn back on themselves, providing a number of shortcuts. Overall, it might differ mostly from the Souls games in having a story that is based on "now" rather than uncovering ago-old lore. I'm not going to say it's the greatest sci-fi tale of any particular time. I had a fair idea what the "twist" was well before it was openly stated. But the story of waking up after a crash in a city going through a nanite apocalypse works fine. There are challenging fights. There is (or at least can be) a fair degree of grinding for improvements. It felt like a solid entry in the genre pretty much all around.

I did have some technical issues, I'll admit. There wasn't any schedule to it, but the game locked up on a loading screen perhaps once for every two hours of play time, requiring a restart. I never lost a lot of progress, so it wasn't a deal breaker for me. I also ran into a few graphical glitches, but nothing major there.

The game features a new game plus mode that I dabbled in. Right off, there's a pretty awesome bit where you get to play through a small segment that occurs just before the original game kicked off, adding a little more context to the story. I loved that. Then I died repeatedly to intro-level enemies who could kill me in two hits because I couldn't equip any of the gear I carried over prior to defeating the first little mini-boss that lets you get a mechanical rig (which enables the inventory, healing items, equipping armor pieces, even dodging). That sort of frustrated me into putting the game down and I think I'm done. I don't believe there are any more story reveals to be seen and it was a good run.

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