The first Surge was an underrated gem in my opinion. A Soulslike with a unique industrial sci-fi setting revolving around a mechanic of dismembering enemies to gain those specific parts. It was dark, brutal and challenging and I enjoyed my time with it playing through several times and the DLC. Despite this I came to The Surge 2 a little late and I wish I hadn’t as it’s a highly enjoyable sequel that improves on the original game in many ways.

The story carries on after the end of the first though this time you play as an entirely new character on a Creo company plane that crash-lands into New Jericho city. You wake up in a prison infirmary to find the city has turned to hell and have to explore to find out what’s going on.

Exploration really is the core of this game. New Jericho is an interesting locale with a mixture of near future sci-fi elements and industrial buildings with old docks, power plants and areas seemingly already suffering from depression before your arrival. New Jericho is very different from the Creo facility in the first game, it’s not as dark or gritty with bright streets and wide areas. Exploring around rewards the played with short cuts to unlock, new items, weapons, upgrades and scrap (currency / experience) looking in every nook and cranny. It’s one of the aspects of the soulslike games I enjoy most and though many people don’t seem to like The surge series much I feel they do it very well.

While exploring there will be constant foes to fight from military police to nano machine infected scavengers. The combat is very deliberate, if you just hack in there is a good chance you will die as enemies can hit hard and will ambush you or fight in groups. Like Dark souls in which this takes influence from you have a stamina bar in The surge 2 that will dictate your actions. Dodging, attacking, blocking all use stamina, if you run out it leaves you extremely vulnerable, sometimes fatally. The biggest addition to the combat from the original game is a parry system called directional blocking in which while holding the generic block button you can tilt the right analogue stick in the direction the attack is coming from at the last second resulting in a parry you can riposte for large damage while they are staggered. This even works on most boss attacks though it takes several successes to stagger them and mistiming it can be a painful result. I really like this system as the entire game isn’t built around it, it’s an optional mechanic you can invest in or use here and there on certain enemies or attacks with your other arsenal.

Upgrading and equipping your character is also flexible. The Surge 2 uses the same dismember mechanic from the first game allowing you to cut limbs off enemies by targeting certain body parts allowing you to get certain crafting materials or new armour schematics to build. Armour sets have both part and full bonuses depending on how many pieces of the same set you have equipped and there are loads. The weapon selection is also huge from single hand, spear, hammers, staffs, dual rigs, gloves as well as a drone that can fire on weakened enemies or used to lure enemies from groups to take them down. With enough scrap you can level your character to equip chips with different abilities and you can respec at almost any time if you want to redistribute stats. I swapped many weapon types and armour sets before settling on a load out of punching gloves and two armour sets to hugely reduce stamina cost. It was great fun and overpowered by the end.

All that said the combat has issues. The enemy variety is really lacking, this goes for bosses as well in which only one is kind of interesting. Due to the nature of the combat and upgrade system most enemies are just humans with different gear and models. Some of the variety the first title had is kind of missing. The targeting system for body parts is also really finicky. Trying to target the body or legs at times seem to constantly target everything else. This caused me to die a couple of times as I wasn’t attacking trying to hit them.

I played this on PS5 and the game was an absolute lock at 60fps which I loved, it was super smooth (I've heard that’s not the case on the base PS4) I really like the visual design and found the graphics solid technically. Facial expressions and animations are super rough though when talking to characters. Whilst some of the characters are interesting and a big improvement of it’s predecessor the voice acting is still really all over the place. Shame really as the game I played after this an indie Metroidvania’s voice acting is absolutely sublime which only emphasized the mediocre performances / direction.

It took me about 60 hours to platinum in one and a half playthroughs including the short but fun Kraken DLC expansion. Overall I really do recommend it. It’s rough around the edges, doesn’t quite hit all it aims for but it’s an extremely fun game to explore and experiment with load-outs while brutally beheading enemies for parts. What more do you want?

Recommended.

+ Enjoyable to explore.
+ Directional blocking is a nice flexible addition.
+ Combat and dismemberment are still a unique idea.
+ Super smooth frame rate on PS5.

- Targeting body parts can be clunky.
- Enemy variety is a little lacking, including bosses.
- Voice acting is rough.