The Surge 2 (2019)

The first game was pretty much the best Soulslike, with a lot of interesting ideas, fun combat and setting, short duration, and a medbay ("bonfire") song that got stuck in your head.

The Surge 2 makes significant improvements to the combat. It was already good, but it adds more things to it. I would dare to say that this is the best combat system in a Soulslike game. On top of that, the game adds a lot of QoL improvement that make the entire gameplay quite pleasant.

The confined spaces of the CREO complex are now changed with the open spaces of the city of Jericho. The level design is as convoluted and trypophobia-inducing as in the first game, but there are more visual cues and the environments look more distinct, so, overall, navigating is less frustrating. Here, again, we have perhaps the best level design in a Soulslike. Later in the game, you also get hooks that help you traverse larger distances and a fast travel system that comes a bit too late. However, the main reason for backtracking in the first game was to get lower lever items to craft and upgrade your gear, but that problem has been solved with the ability to downgrade higher level items.

Not so good is visual performance. I haven't seen a game so far that so badly needed RT. The lighting is just so bad. Also, it uses Vulkan and it has a lot of stability issues. It should be fine, though, if you cap the FPS at the level your graphics card can handle.

For some reason, the devs thought it was a great idea to abandon Warren and to let you create your own character instead. That would have been indeed a great idea if there were any co-op or PvP in the game, or, at least, if there were builds... but no, there's just a character creator for no reason and Warren has become a banal side quest.

The story wasn't exactly great in the first game, but at least it was hard sci-fi. Now you have human bosses that can fly instead of industrial machinery. They thought they ought to just imitate From Software instead of being original, I guess.

Disappointing in many aspects compared to its predecessor, The Surge 2 is still one of the best Soulslikes, if not the best Soulslike out there. It adds a lot of good stuff in terms of gameplay, but there are also some baffling choices. We were so close to having the perfect sci-fi Soulslike, but it wasn't meant to be.

Unfortunately it's still far from the quality of the top offerings from From Soft and Team Ninja. Improvements over The Surge include faster and smoother combat and much more environmental variety. The new directional parry mechanic is a mixed bag. The directional aspect adds almost nothing over having non-directional parries, and the overuse of difficult-to-read windup animations in enemy attacks gets really tiresome. On the positive side, the big damage opportunity reward after a set number of successful parries on bosses is fun, and the limited but easily recharged healing system is good.

Level/area design is much better than The Surge, but is still one of the weakest points of the game. Very few areas are memorable, and several areas feel like they could have been randomly generated. The exolines (zip lines) are pretty neat, but also provide the designers a means to do very lazy area designs. The game has a quirky tone and feels a lot less dark and foreboding compared to the first game. I didn't really pay attention to the story.

The bosses are generally an improvement, but some of the fights still suffer from misdirected gimmicks that fail to meld with the core combat mechanics. The "Metal Armor" fight being perhaps the clearest example. A couple of bosses are repeated several times over, and at least one boss is "just" a souped-up version of a regular enemy you've fought many times before.

There are a couple of technical issues. The upgraded engine seems to run a bit worse than the previous one without really looking much better. The loading screen seems strangely decoupled from the main game engine, causing the annoying issues of sound effects continuing to play when entering a loading screen and the game actually giving you control of your character long before exiting the loading screen. It's probably possible to walk off a ledge before you even know you have control.

The list of souls-likes I would recommend over The Surge 2 include all of From Soft offerings, both of the Nioh games and maybe try Code Vein a bit. If you've exhausted all of that and still feel an itch to play a souls-like, I would say The Surge 2 is a decent choice.

The Surge 2 - First Impressions

This is honestly the biggest surprise of the year for me. Deck13 seems to have taken every single lesson that needed to be learned from the first game and went above and beyond to rectify on them. The quality gap cannot be overstated here, as someone who didn't enjoy the first game at all this is well on the way to being one of my favorite ARPGs in general. A lot of my praise is centered around the guard-parry, which in contrast to most parries in action games, requires you to INPUT IN A DIRECTION OPPOSITE THE ENEMY'S ATTACK, which is phenomenal! Because instead of just a strict timing test, it values enemy awareness. Combine this with strong boss design (insofar where I am), good enemies, solid although linear levels, solid kinesthetics to attacks, genuine weapon variety, depth of options to combat decisionmaking, and what's on offer here is something I really can't wait to come back to to finish.

I'm honestly just sad that it flew under the radar now!