The Surge
Developer: Deck 13
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Price: ₹1999 on PC (Steam); ₹3,999 on PS4 and Xbox One
The insanely difficult Dark Souls series has single-handedly created its own genre and flavour of an action role-playing game. One that is challenging as well as enjoyable, with its risk-reward approach to bloody combat and exploration. Over the years, it has spawned off games like Nioh and Bloodborne. Lords of the Fallen was one of those games, and from the same developer comes another Dark Souls-like game, The Surge. It’s a game that departs from the medieval setting of Souls, into a dystopian futuristic nightmare of metal and blood.
What’s it about?
The Surge takes place in a future we are wildly careening towards. That is, a world with most of our natural resources gone, as well as the life-sustaining protective atmosphere depleted, thanks to global warming. One organisation pledges to fix the environment as well as evolve technology to meld with humans, enabling to be more. You play as Warren, a wheelchair-bound man full of hope, as he signs up with CREO’s augmentation programme. While Warren did start walking again, it was not what he expected. As mad machines drilled him full of holes and fitted him with an exosuit, without sedating him first. When Warren wakes up, everything around him has become one giant junkyard, and he has no memory of what has happened.
The story is based on a dystopian future, born of devastating climate change and our callous ravaging of the planet. The Surge does not delve deep into this, which as a world, provides some amazing opportunities for twists and turns. This depth is squandered for a fairly predictable storyline. While the plot is not bad, it does make for a patchy narrative. Thankfully, the environments do provide a genuinely horrifying look at our future, all hidden in plain sight. As you walk through office areas, warehouses and abandoned military installations, picking up recordings and watching hologram ghosts left over, letting you piece together what happened.
How does it play?
At its core, The Surge is all about beating the scrap out of human-machine cyborgs, robots small and large, and other remnants of technology. It’s a world that’s essentially one big junkyard, just waiting for you to explore. The most satisfying part of The Surge is its bloody, brutal melee combat. As you hack and slash at enemies that leap at you out of every corner, with all manner of makeshift melee weapons you can get your hands on. To up the stakes, the game adds a few layers of risk and reward to keep things spicy.
Improving on the whole attack-and-dodge Souls combat formula, The Surge lets you target individual body parts. You can target weak points and keep bashing at it for extra damage for a quick kill, or you can choose to target the armoured body parts, which take more damage, but yield valuable items. You can choose to finish off enemies with a brutal and showy finishing move, which lops off body parts in gratuitous geysers of blood and metal – which never gets old.
Like Souls, dying is all part of the process, and you will die a lot. When you do take that frequent dirt nap, you will need to double back from the re-spawn point to where you died, to reclaim the scrap you lost. If you die again on the way or run out of time, the scraps are lost. Without scrap, you cannot power up your character or craft new gear.
Boss-fights in a Souls game are the threads that nightmares are woven with. It involves boss monsters so hideous that you actually die multiple times out of sheer terror. This has been a constant hallmark in all games cut from Souls cloth. Sadly, this is a trait that has been left out in The Surge, as you fight an assortment of boring boss monsters that fail to really connect, the same way Dancer of Boreal Valley from Dark Souls III or Father Gascoigne from Bloodborne does.
Graphics-wise, The Surge does look fantastic, but a bit repetitive, as you see the same junk everywhere. Thankfully, it’s the combat that holds it all together, and you can forgive anything, just for a few bouts at dodging and killing. With the beautifully animated melee moves, that connect with an almost palpable impact that sends sparks flying.
Should you get it?
With brilliant combat that sort of makes up for its cookie-cutter story and disappointing bosses, The Surge is a decent game.
Especially if you are a fan of Dark Souls and want a change of scenery, The Surge checks all those boxes.
Julian Almeida is a tech and gaming enthusiast who hopes to one day finish his sci-fi novel
