Quick Look: The Surge 2

I really hope they have gotten better at making the combat and movement feel more weighty.

The weightlessness of it all was a huge turn-off for me before.

Techno Plague is the worst, but also the best.

Damn wouldn’t have thought the PS4 version would run this well. Playing on PC and getting ~30 avg FPS. Might buy it again...

@hassun: feels the same. Actually even less weighty. The rig armature is different now too. Used to be it’d prop your feet up and make you appropriately tall if ur wearing a beefy set of attachments; now, it doesn’t go under the foot at all. In other words, if ur wearing a big piece of heavy gear, like the Rhino gear from the first game, it’s big and bulky, but then tapers down to your little baby feet at the ankle. Looks really dumb.

The game is good, but flawed. Also probably the most open-ended Souls-like I’ve ever played. You can go almost anywhere from the very beginning and it can feel very overwhelming.

@development: Are you playing on a old pc? Meaning, are you getting the performance you would expect, or does there seem to be something wrong with the game specifically? I can tell you that:

1. In-game vsync is currently broken in Surge 2 hugely affecting performance so I recommend activating vsync through your drivers. *technical sidenote*: last time I checked borderless vulkan presented app don't use iflip, and are rendered without vsync (unlike dxgi presented apps). This means that the game will tear in borderless with vsync turned off. This may be a misunderstanding on my part, in which case running the game in borderless alone should fix tearing, without requiring vsync.

2. Unless you are already running the game at a really low resolution, you can turn down the internal resolution to 85%, activate TAA, and use post sharpening to compensate for the blur (using nvidia freestyle in this case).

3. You may want to try deleting the vulkan api file in the game's directory (vulkan-1.dll). It is completely unnecessary if your drivers are up to date, as it is an old version of the vulkan loader. Once deleted, the game will use the most recent version of the runtime installed on your computer (most likely from your gpu driver package, or you can google vulkan RT and install the latest version, it should be ~1130KB).

4. DRS is on by default in the game, and turned on to "aggressive." You may have turned it off, or changed the setting. Personally I don't like DRS so I recommend scaling the internal resolution directly, but they can be used in conjunction.

Obviously you already know to turn down settings to your satisfaction, so I won't go into that. In fact you may already know all of this, so I might be wasting my time, but perhaps it will help someone else. It's worth keeping in mind that this game is having issues on all platform at the moment, and that patches could help a lot. A portion of these issues are due to the game using vulkan exclusively, so updating your drivers is a must in this case.

Have fun!

[EDIT] Typos.

Oh and by the way it looks like regular ps4 performance is less than ideal from what I see reported.

I really like Rory, but god he's so annoying in this.

This version of the game looks much worse than even a very inexpensive PC. We really need those new consoles! It's one of the things that pushed me back to PC after 3 generations of console gaming. (My last PC build before this year was for MechWarrior 4 lol).

Techno-Apocalypse, also best/worst

Looks like someone took a Keyblade to a gun-fight.

@unlivedphalanx: This is certainly true. Also, this game looks like poop even when maxed out at 5K. In fact, I'm pretty sure the original game would compare favorably to it's sequel. Some of those textures are... Baffling. I do like some of the art style and world building though.

Are you in the MW5 alpha?

This game has horrible blacks. It's one of the first thing I noticed about the game. Go to a pitch black corner, and open the menu. You'll see how much deeper the blacks are in the menu.

Unfortunately reshade doesn't work with this game, so I recommend using nvidia Freestyle. It can be enabled in the nvidia experience settings, and can be adjusted by hitting alt-f3 in-game. If it shows the game as being "unsupported" you can force enable it by making a duplicate of the game's .exe. and renaming it to "anselintegrationtestapp.exe." Ideally, I'd love to have my curves in freestyle, or better level controls, but those aren't options yet. In lieu of those, the best setting to modify in this game would be the "shadows" variable under the "contrast" filter.

I'd post screenshots, but my comments are turning into a guide, and this is a PC only fix so it can't help everyone.

I'm not! I don't have time to test right now because of nursing school, but I am VERY MUCH looking forward to MW5. Some sources will lie to you and tell you I cried when it was revealed.

@dragonmoony: He was quite....sassy

"Let's take a look at the little girl!"

- Rory 2019

@unlivedphalanx: "Some sources"? Sounds like a fact to me! Print!

I'm pretty much doubly excited for MW5. We're getting a new MechWarrior game, AND we're getting a new mercenaries installment. I don't know if you have experience with MWO (I barely do) but from what I've heard, the feel of the game is totally there. MW5 being from the same dev, and all the MTX stuff being removed, I think we're set for success.

Man I was really curious about this game and I feel like this quick look showed almost nothing.

I really like these games, at the same time I always get to the finish in anger.

I do appreciate a QL of this. Perhaps there will be a playdate for this game down the road, sometime. Brad's time with the last game is what got me interested in The Surge.

I do kind of wish that guy hanging out at the barrel dodged a little or ran while Brad was running around fighting the foes. His just standing there seemed a bit at odds with what was happening. And how he was too crafty to be caught.

Also, I payed 50.00 for the Surge 2 for pc, as opposed to 60.00. I checked again before I wrote this, and it is still $49.99. Just to comment.

Holy moly, the graphical quality in this performance version is terrible. It looks worse than Nier Automata.

As I was reading the cast list for this QL, for a brief moment I was baffled and thought who is Matt?

Listened to Rob Zombie on Joe Rogan last week and he sounds very similar to Matt Rorie... maybe its just me.

Holy shit that texture pop-in though

@borealum: My brain couldn't take watching the whole thing because it was just waiting for pop-in the entire time.

Having made it through, I'll say this - you might want to wait for a patch, because oof.

Brad & Rorie might be my favorite rare treat duo at GBW.
Don't care much about the Surge games though.
I like my Souls-likes to be darker and more demonic.

Dang is this the PS3 version? Good to see GB mostly positive on a game but man this looks rough and janky. Is it finished?

This looks a lot rougher than I was expecting it to

After championing the first game as really innovative but lacking that specific polish I was really looking forward to this. Sadly it looks like they took it in a direction that doesn’t grab me and away from the things I found compelling about the original.

Also Game Pass has ruined me because.. I can wait until this is on Game Pass.

So glad im not the only one to use the Search & Rescue drone not knowing what it does only to lose thousands of Tech Scrap X_X

I'm about 12 hours into the game and I am loving it. It is ugly as hell on PS4 Pro even on graphics mode (about 80% of textures just never load) but I've yet to have a frame drop and the game plays so great.

Really enjoyed Rorie on this, lots of good useful questions. Especially for Brad who no offense can kind of lose direction :)

I'm looking forward to playing this when they've ironed some of the issues out, think I'm safe to wait a while.

who needs textures!

Is it me or was this quicklook a bit hurried and not all that informative? Like Rorie asks what the story is like and all we got from that question is that there's a techno-plague that turns people into zombies and that it's 'fine'. At the end we could've witnessed a bit of that story for ourselves perhaps, but Brad didn't want to get caught in a super long cutscene, despite this quicklook not being that long in the grand scheme of things. Greedfall, Gears, Man of Maidan, Remnant, Control, NBA & Links Awakening are all 50 min or longer.

Not getting to a boss is something you can't always plan for if a game doesn't have obvious bossdoors, but i don't see why cutscenes should be avoided in a quicklook? Especially when a series does away with a named protagonist in favor for a character creator, it's interesting to see how that change impacts the story.

Do you have a voice? Are you 'The Chosen One' or are you just the guy that takes on tasks? Is the character creator robust enough or lacking? Is the tone just as metal as that openings scene of the Surge 1 where you roll out of your wheelchair and get bolted into this exoskeleton?

maybe not the most informative quick look but the combat looks good enough that I’ll pick this up at some point.

I'd really like to play this. I hope the technical issues are mostly sorted out in a patch or two.

If nothing else, it'll probably be worth picking up come Christmas time.

@onemanarmyy: If this is anything like the first game Brad's summation seems appropriate given how the game treats its plot and setting as it's done very minimally.

*Oingo Boingo starts playing*

@onemanarmyy: @fontelroy: , There was a very sparse story in The Surge. Minimal.

But it wasn't in my view a bad one. It had consequences. But I'm not sure about The Surge 2, including what I got from the QL.

I jumped out and bought the game, but I should have waited for good ole Christmas. I will be waiting that long probably to play it.

Geez, every time it says 'Matt' in the info box i find myself spending a few seconds wondering who that is...

@onemanarmyy: Regarding the "fine" line...That's a problem that plagues Giant Bomb as a whole. Brad is especially bad about it, but almost everyone uses quick, non-explanatory language frequently when trying to describe something. "It's fine," "it's a game," "the story is there," are things that are typically said at least once per video. For a website whose purpose is to provide information about games, it's really ridiculous.

Surprised devs keep sending GB the console version, as they are starting to look very dated. Game looks fun though!

good to see budget titles from steam initially priced at $15 are making the jump to consoles

@humanity: Its easily as good as the first game, ironing out a lot of the crap in that (e.g. upgrade system is massively simplified). Sadly it also introduces a parry system that is just downright broken on a PS4 controller and took me at least 20 hours to get used to. If you love the exploration and wrap-around paths that the Surge did super-well then this is definitely worth a normal £30 buy

@oueddy: yah I’m definitely getting it but at this point I’ve resigned myself to waiting for a sale and also I guess a few much needed patches. Yesterday I watched a random Mixer stream where a guy was fighting and then suddenly clipped through the floor or just teleported to a caged off part of the map and thankfully he had the drone that lets you recall to a medbay but oooof that was rough.

So far I have been enjoying it. Put about 30 hours in so far on the PC version and ran into just a few bugs: weird clipping and a quest I completed that won't finish in the log menu.

Also, the noise the force/lift hook makes is absolutely grating to my ears. Considering how much you use it in the later parts of the game, it's making me want to mute all the sounds.