A decent take on what now became a genre
The Surge is a souls-like game, set in a futuristic world where kind of an apocalipse happened. In a sense of a mega corporation that produces robots couldn't handle their sh*t, making machines and ciborgs go crazy. It's a very interesting setting, and it's very well done, the game has a great start to it, in my opinion, but it takes too long to pick up the interesting parts in the middle/end. The game has Metroidvania elements and doesn't tell you exactly what to do or where to go next, kind of like you know what.
The look of this game is amazing! Very well done graphics, with some good sense of atmosphere, specially when it comes to the lighting. Walking through locations that are almost too dark for you to see, with some flashs of lights and reflections on an enemy that suddenly jumps on you from the side, in almost a scary way. The walking in and out of factories and things like that, the look of the characters and their armor, it just looks amazing and so detailed. The problem is the variety, alot of rooms with ciborgs look alike throughout the whole game.
The sound design is also very well done, just like the lightning, and it's surprising, not in a sense that I expected to be bad, but that it's so hard to make you really feel like you are in a close space hearing ciborg movement while they hit metal with metal or metal in flesh. Great stuff! The problem I had was when I was walking expecting a ambush and kept twisting the camera around, it looks like the sound on the headphones stay by your characters position, so if I turned the camera 180, the left/right would be inverted of my screen, if you know what I mean. Threw me off a couple of times, but that is another point for realism.
The gameplay is alot light a Souls game, almost identical. Instead of Souls you collect Scraps, and have to spend them to upgrade, but if you die, you drop them right in that place and have to go back and get it. The upgrade system is kind of simple, but I don't mind that, not overwhelming the player with builds to scratch your head trying to figure out the best. The weapon variety is sick, not so much by how it plays, because I quickly choose one and kept upgrading it through it all, but how different it looks, it's so cool to play dress up in this game. Test new things just to see how fast and hard it hits. The game also has the equivalent of the bondfire, what is a type of medical center, more like the safe house in the PSone Resident Evil games. It's actually really cool.
The main difference in the game is the type of targeting system. When you lock on to a target, you also choose the body part you're gonna hit, split by: Head, Chest, L/R arms and L/R legs. And most enemies have weak spots, that you have to hit to increase damage and knockback. Making for a nice twist, and a good variety to keep you in check. But what made it frustating for me was the enemies that have no weak points and were fast, gave a difficulty spike feel that I usually don't like in games. It felt like some enemies weren't supposed to be there, that can happen in this type of games, but man I didn't like that. But the weak spot in general is a thumbs up for me, because it has the coolest thing in the game, that is: you have a type of finishing move, when you take the target health low enough and have enough energy, you can chop off the part of the body you're selecting, and if for instance, the enemy has a weapon that you don't have, and you chop off his arm, you get that weapon, that's great game design in my book.
