The Surge 2

So the game just came out today, and I decided to give it a run for myself. After 1.5 hours, here are some initial impressions/observations.

- Character customization is fairly basic, a bit better than Destiny's

- Fits pretty neatly into the "Eurojank" archetype

- As expected, it's not as polished as the Souls series or Nioh (Art direction, animations)

- Performance is rather questionable on an i3-8100 and RX 570. I dropped it to 900p, and was fine, but you'll probably want to wait for a few patches

- The level design's kinda cluttered, has a lot of shortcuts, decently vertical and is pretty mazey, I found it kinda fun despite all that

- You can target limbs, and then focus damage on them to chop them off

- Targeting unarmoured limbs = More damage

- Chopping off limbs = Getting blueprint for armour on that part, so there's a bit of a risk-reward dynamic: Go for the easy, efficient kill, or try and get access to new armour?

- You can also get their weapons by chopping off their limbs, I think

- The devs seem to really like their slow motion kills

- They're reasonably well animated, and I don't mind the closer shot, but I would prefer less slow-mo

- You have a drone that can do a number of things, like shoot the enemy, set down a mine, throw an explosive, give you buffs, set down a turret, etc

- You can use the Drone's attacks to hit the targeted limbs from a distance

- Has a parry system reminiscent of For Honour: Block, and then flick the right analogue stick in the direction that the enemy is attacking from. You can choose to have indicators, or not. I sometimes found it pretty confusing as to which direction they're attacking from, so I kept them on

- You can also just hit dodge without moving the analogue stick to duck their attack, and then counter (Not as strong as a parry)

- Dodging is definitely not the main focus of the combat, it's mainly about parrying/countering

- Certain enemies can go into a "berserker" mode where they're more aggressive, stronger, and tankier, it's pretty neat

- There can be a lot of tracking on enemies

- RPG aspects are definitely pretty major, but they give you a nice amount of customization, for what it's worth

The parrying/ducking system was something I found pretty neat. And you can parry most things, even large robots and giant double-bladed axes. Unlike a certain game based on Norse mythology that came out in 2018.

I had quite a bit of fun with the game for the short time I've played it so far, and I'm probably gonna keep it. I doubt you guys would like it as much, though.

I only watched someone play the first game and only ever heard terrible things about it. Surprised it's getting a sequel if it was as bad as they claimed.

Aside from drones, are there any ranged weapons for your character? I remember there being no ranged options in the first game.

Not as far as I saw.

I played the first game for a bit hoping to get into the series because the sequel looked cool.
In the first game you could turn off all slow motion animations in the options, I did that immediately. Did they remove that?

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hedfone wrote:I played the first game for a bit hoping to get into the series because the sequel looked cool.
In the first game you could turn off all slow motion animations in the options, I did that immediately. Did they remove that?

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That, I don't know. I'll have to check.

Always interesting to read some good quality notes on a new title. Never dove into the first game myself, only watching a few and far between runs, but nothing big or anything. I'm mostly interested in the delimb mechanics, do enemies change at all when you cut a limb off i.e. they become passive, get different movesets or something similar?

Royta/Raeng wrote:Always interesting to read some good quality notes on a new title. Never dove into the first game myself, only watching a few and far between runs, but nothing big or anything. I'm mostly interested in the delimb mechanics, do enemies change at all when you cut a limb off i.e. they become passive, get different movesets or something similar?

The delimbing is the kill animation. It's not like in Ninja Gaiden 2 where you randomly delimb people, and then can execute them: You target the limb, and then as you keep damaging it, eventually a prompt comes up (Like God of War), where you can dismember, and kill the enemy.

hedfone wrote:I played the first game for a bit hoping to get into the series because the sequel looked cool.
In the first game you could turn off all slow motion animations in the options, I did that immediately. Did they remove that?

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It's still there. I decided to turn it off too.

More info about the game:

- The first major boss, Little Johnny, is basically Blade Wolf in terms of his role: He's meant to teach you the importance of parrying, and it's definitely the way you're supposed to win... Not just wait whenever he slams down to whack him.

- He's a pretty good boss fight overall; You really need to be able to consistently parry (3 times in a row in order to knock him down). It's not that hard, but if you lose your rhythm, you're dead.

- If you went for the bosses front claws, and dismembered them, you're given an extra weapon. Kinda like the Bell Gargoyles in Dark Souls.

- Timing your button presses correctly when attacking means that you'll consume less stamina, so I'm definitely gonna have to take some time to learn each weapon

Some more notes:

- The game isn't actually purely about the parry: I got that wrong. However, it is much more emphasized than in Souls, since you can actually fucking do it against almost any enemy. I don't recommend using against all of them though, since that would get boring.

- Now that I started dodging more, I just realized how stupidly fast it is. It's faster than even Bloodborne's.

I gotta say, I'm a pretty big fan of this game.