The Surge
Robot Souls
The Surge is a souls like rpg all about the grind
Here you play as either a technician who’s agile and quick or a brute who does more damage but is slower,
Each have their own advantages and disadvantages of course, I chose to play as a brute.
I was surprised how much I initially enjoyed this game…
This game is definitely challenging but not quite at the levelThe Surge
Robot Souls
The Surge is a souls like rpg all about the grind
Here you play as either a technician who’s agile and quick or a brute who does more damage but is slower,
Each have their own advantages and disadvantages of course, I chose to play as a brute.
I was surprised how much I initially enjoyed this game…
This game is definitely challenging but not quite at the level of the souls game or nioh…
The maps are fairly self-contained and compact here…
This makes it very easy to memorize enemy locations when it comes to the grinding and crafting portion of the game
the combat with regular enemies is pretty decent and feels fair.. at least when its one on one…
you can lock onto them and target specific body parts to attempt to saw off certain gear…
Sometimes you’ll get new gear like weapons…
but mostly you’ll just get parts along with other scraps to craft armor from schematics you find in the world…
there’s really no true loot system here…
The scraps are essentially your souls..
And like in the soul’s game if you die you have to go recollect them...
But you are able to bank them in your medbay which is where you go to heal, level up, install new implants for added perks like consumable health, craft new weapons and armor, upgrade them, and refill your consumables…
Leveling up just requires scraps while crafting and upgrading requires scraps as well as random items you have to pick off of enemies based on luck of course…
and also like the souls games, going to this room respawns every enemy you’ve killed which is a gift and a curse..
A gift because you can grind...
worlds are small and bosses are brutal…
youre definitely going to grind for levels and upgrades...
a curse because once you do finally make it to a boss theyre all in your way trying do some damage to you before you even get there…
But before we get to the bosses..
There is definitely some cheapness going on outside of them…
Things don’t really start getting cheap until the 2nd section of the game… here you get a drone friend which is nice… though to use them you have to fill up your energy bar a bit, but by time that happens you’ve usually already killed the enemy.. So it’s pretty useless…
but this is where enemies start using ranged gun type weapons that you can’t do anything about but take the damage and push forward...
And there are no health pickups here... youre relient on your implants to replenish your health except for the extremely rare refill stations... and by rare I mean like 1 in a map…
But still it was fun to push forward, grind, find alternate paths, unlock shortcuts like demons souls so when you do die you can skip giant sections of the map to get right back to where you died
These cheap moments were annoying and unfair... but I still didn’t mind them.. At least not as much as the boss battles…
The bosses here aren’t hard by themselves...
Theyre pretty simple and easy to figure out...
the difficulty comes in the games design both level and combat…
For starters.. Enemy attacks go right through solid objects... there is no hiding behind beams…
That aside, This combat system was not designed for the boss battles... at least not with both classes in mind…
the 2nd boss in the game is where I stopped…
And I did so not because it was a tough boss…
I knew its patterns, I knew how to defeat it...
the problem was, as a brute... maybe this is just a brute problem…
But as a brute the problem was the timing of this bosses attacks…
Enemeis will telegraph their attacks..
Give you some time to get out of the way
But you’re locked into animations here...
You’re able to dodge in combat, but only when you’re not attacking…
And this boss demands quick hits and dodging...
And this just isn’t possible to do efficiently as a brute…
don’t get me wrong, I’d definitely get lucky and have a flawless first stage of this battle… but the 2nd stage when you have to attack it from underneath is when things really start to get unfair because your character doesn’t get out of animation fast enough for you to have time to dodge the near insta kill slam this enemies does when you’re underneath..
Cause theres bad hit detection
Both from enemies as id randomly lose damage during fights without being touched, and from you as your attacks will do nothing at times especially to bosses…
Based off of what I saw though, The Surge is still a good game…
its addictive in the way the souls games are…
But at moments it falls into the category of unfair more than it does challenging and that sours the addictive and great moments that are here too
I give The Surge
a 7/10… Expand
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