Here at Roguelike Start, we like to be at the cutting edge of games media and discourse. We’d like to be anyway. With the recent release of the Surge by Deck 13, we thought we’d try our hand at the first few hours of the game. Set in a dystopian world where big tech corporations have exhausted the world’s natural resources and service robots have taken everyone’s jobs. You play as Warren, on his first day at his new job for CREO, one of those big tech corporations. So what does the Surge have in store for Warren and you the player?
Everything is Dark Souls Now.
The first thing we need to set straight is just how similar this game is in terms of design and gameplay to the Souls series by FromSoftware. The combat, the exploration, the boss fights, everything about The Surge is a cover version of the well-established design philosophy that has made the Souls games so beloved by an ever-growing set of the gaming community. This set would appear to include a lot of game developers who just love the whole FromSoft ethos to game design.
Bait and Switch
Booting up the game for the first time and being given control of the player character I was immediately struck by something that for the life of me I’d never seen in a game before. In the intro sequence, the player character, a man by the name of Warren is in a wheelchair. Disability in video games in such a real sense is rare, sure there are times when player characters are harmed but to start the game in such an immediately vulnerable position felt unique. Very quickly this angle is dropped when the player has some robotic do-dads drilled into their skeleton in a rather nasty cutscene. Now fully able (for now) the player is ready to go get killed by all manner of sci-fi horrors.
Aim For The Bits You Want.
The combat as you’d expect is all very hack & slash in the mould of Souls game. Attacks carry a certain weight with them as they collide with foes’ bodies (if they don’t just clip right through as sometimes happens). Enemies can be focused on and individual body parts can be targeted for dismemberment. You can choose to target unarmoured parts for greater damage or you can take a risk and target the more heavily armoured parts of a foe and try to hack it off. Doing so will reward you with whatever that enemy had equipped. So if you like a weapon or helmet an enemy has on, just slaughter them. After all, it’ll look better on you than it ever did on them.
Boss fight Bother
So far I’ve only encountered one Boss fight and I must say It left me a little cold. If you’ve seen any footage of the game it’s quite likely you’ll have seen this encounter, featuring a bi-pedal robot that looks like the one from Robocop. For most of the fight, I was just smashing my weapon against its legs, doing no real damage but instead filling a bar that would then decide when I was allowed to start doing damage for a very brief period. This fight was designed to teach the player a few important lessons, which I’m sure to ignore in the coming hours. To pick my moments, when to back off and when to go in for the kill. While not a particularly inspiring fight it does have me curious to see what later boss encounters will look like.
Like its spiritual predecessors, this game is one that relies on the player learning from every mistake. Every badly timed attack or misjudged dodge can be punishing. I can’t say for sure whether the Surge will keep my attention. but I have a bad habit of bouncing off games like Bloodborne or Dark Souls and those games are genuine masterpieces, whether or not the Surge remains to be seen
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