4/5 ★ – Jackdh1990's review of The Surge.

Enjoying The Surge as much as I ended up doing was a genuine shock to me. I have a really, really low tolerance for souls-like games. Not FromSoftware Souls games, souls-LIKES. These games just seem to miss the mark most of the time, taking what they think is the point of these games (punishing difficulty, boss runbacks, corpse-running), but without the things that make those games transcendent (hope, overcoming the odds, encouraging NPCs). The Surge is like, one of the OG souls-likes, along with Deck13s original Lords of the Fallen. I think I picked this up shortly after playing Dark Souls 3, as I was itching for some more to fill the gap. I ended up playing it a bit, but then abandoned it when it didn't quite hit (I think I ended up doing another Bloodborne playthrough). Coming back to it years later (and a lot more wary of FromSoft knockoffs), I was ready to not enjoy my time here. Early hours, it's a little mean. Lots of gotcha jump-outs from enemies, a very mean robot boss, a challenging underground section. It's super unfriendly. The whole time as well I was really anxious that I'd end up hitting a wall and end up unable to finish it (I mean, kind of daft really as I've played many hard games), so with that in the back of my mind I kind of struggled to have fun. It took a quite a while for me to fully embrace the Surge's unique mechanics. I straight up ignored the drone you get in the second area, and hoped that the limb-targeting was optional. Only when I discovered the true power of these two things did I start to realise that there is a real power creep to this game. You put just a little work in, you can turn yourself into a real walking tank quite fast. I started to really enjoy running out and harvesting limb pieces - of course, it's a very addictive two birds one stone situation; you get both resources to craft and improve your armour and weaponry, AND scrap to level up and improve your stats. This is great! I often felt like a hunter, ranging out in the spooky sci-fi corridors to find specific enemies to scrounge specific pieces, knowing that I'd come back every time more powerful than ever. It's also really got the juice with the animations here, lots of big badass slo-mo finishers that make it much more gonzo than anything FromSoft would do. I started as well, to let go of such comparisons and let The Surge be it's own thing. And it really is! While of course Dark Souls is the inspiration it feels less like a copycat than other similar games. It's not a perfect game, there is a lot of frustration. "Platforming" can be very janky, especially as it's often unclear what counts as a platform or not. The game likes to gank you with multiple enemies as well, leading to some serious pile-ups; this is NOT a game for dealing with multiple foes. Carefully clearing one-by-one is the name of the game. There aren't many boss fights in the game, but they are pretty much all horrible fights against huge machines. I did a fair amount of stropping over these bastards. The story is actually pretty solid, but there's a lot of stuff going on and it sometimes devolves into gobbledegook. All in all, once I realised I was allowed to have fun, and that the game wasn't just out to give me a bad time on purpose, I really enjoyed The Surge. It's tough, and often unfair, but I would absolutely recommend it to fans of these tough games - this is one of the good 'uns. 8/10 Played on PS4 26/10/25