The Surge

Warning: I'm not holding back on spoilers (though there may not be very many of those). If you haven't experienced The Surge by yourself and would like to do so, do so before reading this article. My intention is not to write a review or recommendation, although you may read this so, but to try to pick apart some points in the game that worked or didn't work for me. Overall I feel very positive about The Surge.



The Surge was originally released in 2017 but I got to know it only when it was given to me as one of the April 2019 free games on the PlayStation Plus service. I had seen the game on the store before but never paid much attention to it. In screenshots it looked to me first like a yet another 3rd person cover shooter (which it's definitely not), and later it looked like yet another Souls-like (which it is). I wasn't interested in the least.

My only thorough experience with Souls-like games is when I completed Bloodborne on the PS4. It took me over 80 hours over multiple months and got me really frustrated in the process. In the end, I thought that it was still a good experience to finish it and to get exposed to the story, the setting and the plentiful game-mechanical challenges. Regardless, since then I've steered away from Souls-likes in the fear of getting locked down to spending another precious 80 hours in gameplay filled with frustration to the point of agony.

Well, I did briefly try out Lords of the Fallen, which is another Souls-like game that was available for free on Playstation Plus a couple of years ago. I only played until the first boss'ish fight. I didn't enjoy LotF because I felt like the game was only allowing me to proceed to the next fight, and then I had to repeat that one fight until I got a bit forward. It was like a neverending series of steep challenges. The plot I don't remember anything about. Only later did I realize that Deck 13, the German developer of The Surge, was also involved in making Lords of the Fallen together with the Polish developer City Interactive.

Meeting a colleague, zombified without his morning coffee.

So, as I started up The Surge for the first time, I was more than skeptical. Luckily for me, the game started with an easy-to-understand intro sequence. Warren, a man tied to a wheelchair, signs up for a job at a big corporation who is in the process of healing the Earth's failing atmosphere. The corporation is called CREO but—if you ask me—it could just as well be spelled "Google" or "SpaceX". The gameplay starts as he arrives for his first day at the job. He gets his exoskeleton installed but something goes wrong in the process. He wakes up in the junkyard, on his way to getting disposed. The world around him doesn't seem like it used to be, and it's really difficult to find other people who aren't violently aggressive and/or in a zombie-like state.

Getting lost vs. exploration

Speaking about visual content, The Surge is quite a small game. It's only 10 GB on the PS4. On one hand it's a positive thing: small disk size means short loading times. One major source of frustration that I had with Bloodborne was that every time I died (and I died many times) there was a 30-second wait until I got to resume play from the last save point. The Surge loads only for a few seconds. But the downside of not spending that much disk space in 3D assets is that many places in the game world tend to look very similar. There are many corridors with cables on them and an exo-lift at the end.

Carrier rockets raining on mankind. Identical art can be seen in multiple places.

The game presents you with very crude maps here and there but they are nothing that I'm able to navigate by. Also the Internet seems void of any attempts to draw a map of the game world of The Surge. At times I got so confused with navigation that, to save me from extra hours of running in circles, I read a written walkthrough in the hopes of getting a vague idea of where the next unopened door might be. It wasn't easy.

In the beginning the level layout is easy enough to understand. There is one or two pathways that you can travel forward. Occasionally you get to open a door that leads back to the beginning, essentially providing you a shortcut from the Ops (i.e. safe zone) back to the furthest point that you've reached in the level. But over time these shortcuts became a problem for me. When there's multiple identical doorways and dozens of seconds of running along corridors and minutes of fighting challenging enemies, I had a hard time keeping track of which locations I had yet to search.

In-game maps didn't help me navigate.

There were times when I found a way back to a previous level. That made me spend literally hours roaming around that earlier level, looking for a new door that I could open. And there were none. Actually I was supposed to continue in the latest level. The shortcut to the earlier level was apparently only a convenience for players who'd like to grind some lower level gear or explore places they skipped earlier.

It's said that it's bad when a game holds the player's hand, for example in the form of map markers that always point you to your current quest. I'd argue that it's equally bad if the game misleads the player to look for content in places where there's none. As long as game content is static and progress happens only at scripted occasions—as they are in just about all current games—there needs to be subtle guidance towards the interesting content.

Static props like this can actually contain loot.

Despite my occasional frustration with figuring out where to go, one of the best aspects in The Surge was exploration. Just about all the time I had the pleasant feeling of not quite knowing what's coming. Not having a clear map of the game world, combined with the constant threat and gameplay challenge of hostiles created a level of tension that kept me glued to the controller. I even got to wonder if frustration is actually a necessary emotion in order to feel more positive about the highlights of any game. To support this notion, my worst experiences with The Witcher 3 are when it becomes the AAA version of the instant and constant gratification machinery that mobile games are known for. You never lose much. The cost of experiencing those games is mostly your time which is drained by the neverending feed of unsurprising content. The Surge may have got me a bit frustrated when getting lost in its levels but it wasn't necssarily a bad experience because I was having a good time with the combat mechanics all the time.

I made an interesting observation as I started New Game+ after completing the story. The first level seemed much smaller than on first playthrough. All the dark corridors and crate-filled nooks seemed much easier to see and comprehend. I remembered where to go and how to unlock progress to the next level, so I could pretty much just run straight there. Also, hostiles were so much more predictable after the extra 50 hours of melee combat practice. Completing the first level happened in less than an hour and getting to the second boss took just about as long, which is merely a fraction of what it took me the first time.

As one example of my navigational troubles in my first playthrough, I pretty much ran past the switch that you have to flip in order to get to the first boss. I probably spent a couple of extra hours rummaging through other places, fighting enemies carefully, and examining the level geometry in order to determine if there were accessible locations that I hadn't explored yet. When I finally got to that switch for the first time, I don't even remember noticing that flipping it turned on lights in the room. In New Game+ all these things seemed so clear and obvious.

A second surprise was a hostile hidden behind a locked door. As you open the door, the hostile jumps out and gives you a tough fight. I recall that on my first playthrough that enemy seemed much tougher than the others. In New Game+ I was prepared, and as the hostile jumped out, I recognized his attack patterns as something that was merely a common adversary a bit later in the game. The significance of that hostile was so much bigger when he was the only occurrence of his kind.

I chose Lynx. Rhino was the other choice that I overlooked.

A third, even a bit embarrassing oversight on my part on my first playthrough was that I honestly didn't realize that at the very start of the game you choose to walk through one of two doors. This choice decides the gear that you start with. The game narrative at that point clearly states "Please choose from our two currently available positions," yet I didn't realize that this was an actual choice that I could make. Not much was lost, though, because you can quickly get either gear or more by playing the game.

I think these observations tell important lessons about game development. First, what might seem obvious to the developer after a couple of years of building the game world might be very confusing or easy to overlook to the player who explores the world for the first time. And second, the player can get a big kick out of small things as long as they are presented smartly, making the small things stand out as something unique.

Enjoyable tactical gameplay

A central part of the game mechanics is how you can build your loadout. I'll try to explain the main points of the resource management where the tactical gameplay element comes from.

The premise is simple: you fight with hostiles using mostly melee weapons. Each game character has a number of health and a weapon that inflicts some amount of damage. In addition to health, each character has an amount of stability. Each weapon has some amount of impact which reduces the opponent's stability, eventually making him stagger, which is a significant disadvantage in a fight. Each character also has an amount of stamina which depletes when swinging the weapon or dodging attacks. If you run out of stamina, you can't do any of these actions for a while. Finally, energy is gained by dealing successful blows. It powers implants and droids and will deplete quickly if not used.

There are a lot of implants to adjust your loadout.

To tune your loadout, you equip a weapon, 6 pieces of armor, a number of implants, and a drone module. Your choice of armor affects your attack speed and use of stamina but also determines your stability. Additionally, by equipping a full set of similar armor you get a unique bonus which could be boosted health implants or faster attacks.

The implants are the most versatile way to customize your loadout. There are about 40 kinds of implants and they all come in multiple power levels. Most implants will affect the economy of your health, stamina and energy. Other implants can increase your core power, make your weapons more effective, or boost your tech scrap gain. It's the health-stamina-energy economy that I found the most intriguing.

If you base your loadout on the use of energy, you'll want to have as much of it as possible. A good start is to pick a weapon that gives lots of energy on each successful hit. Then you might want to increase your maximum energy level to be able to stack that energy better. To be able to use the energy over a longer time, you'd want to slow down energy decay and to cap energy loss before it runs out completely. Alternatively, if you plan to use your energy as you gain it, you might want to reduce the amount of energy used and forget about decay speed. Or, you can choose implants that activate when the energy level is high, and avoid actions that cost energy.

It's important to finish a fight by chopping off one of the opponent's body parts for reuse.

A major limiting factor of your choice of implants is your core power level. You gain it by leveling up your rig with tech scrap. Each piece of armor and each implant reserves some core power. So, you might want to put on expensive armor and less powerful implants, or cheaper armor and more powerful implants. Furthermore, you can sacrifice some implant slots for additional core power and have fewer but more powerful implants.

Tech scrap is also used in crafting pieces of gear and upgrading both weapons and gear. Gear comes in six pieces; head, body, two arms, and two legs. To craft new kind of piece of gear, you first need a schematic for it. The way to do this is to chop the respective piece off an enemy. For successful dismemberment you need to have targeted your attacks at that part for most of the fight, the part should not have been covered by armor in the first place, and your final blow must be a special cut attack that uses a bunch of energy. Doing this soon becomes a second nature as you progress in the game.

In addition to a schematic and tech scrap you also need relevant components to craft a piece of gear. Components are mostly collected from recycled parts of enemies. So, by chopping off a leg you can gain schematics and useful components for crafting that particular type of leg, or for upgrading any type of leg. The level of the chopped-off leg determines the level of the recycled components, which in turn determines which level of upgrade you can use the components for.

All this sounds a bit complicated when written out, but in-game I had no problems working with this system. I felt it provided additional motivation for doing the fights in a certain way, trying to target various pieces of gear and trying to look for enemies with new types of gear. It added a layer of tactical play on top of the already interesting combat and exploration.

Sunglasses are one option for head gear.

One thing did bother me, though. Over time it became more and more difficult to do the tactical loadout planning with implants. The reason was that the menu system for doing it didn't provide helpful enough ways to organize the multitude of options that I had. Towards the end of the game I had around one hundred implants; some duplicates (their effects stack), and some of various levels. Several times I had an idea to try out but couldn't keep it in my head for long enough to actually find the correct implants to carry it out. The mental load for organizing the loadout was too large.

I recall playing Bloodborne by mostly sticking with the starter weapon that I chose, the Saw Cleaver. It was versatile enough to survive all kinds of monsters. In The Surge, my original weapon of choice was the ASTir Vibro-Cutter. It has pretty fast attacks and good energy gain. At first I feared that I would never have to switch weapons to accommodate to varying challenges, much like Bloodborne had been to me. But to my pleasant surprise, around the third area combat became much easier after switching to a heavy-duty weapon such as the Bloodhound for its excellent impact. Towards the end I also found good use of Codename: Parsifal for its good crush damage and delightful energy gain.

Difficulty was manageable

I like the honesty of combat in The Surge. If you stay at a distance from a hostile, he won't be able to damage you, save for the infrequent projectile attack. Also, if a hostile is walking about, "thinking" about his next attack, you can pretty confidently hit him with a fast attack. Most hostiles don't have an inhumane blocking skill that would require the player to perform particular attack combos in order to deal damage. Furthermore, most hostiles don't have excessively magnetic attacks. If you walk or run away fast enough, you can avoid getting hit if you see an attack coming. The most notable exception is the magically magnetic slam of a brute towards the end of the game. He does a slide tackle towards you and continues with a slam which is always directed at you even if you manage to run to his other side during the slide tackle.

This kind of honesty in melee combat gives the player a decent amount of control over the course of a fight. It takes away from the possible frustration that the game could cause, and makes the gameplay feel more systems-based than railroaded. Admittedly, I did have to change my weapon and gear at times to suit the challenges I was facing. Yet, I never felt that the game was being unfair about that. On the contrary, I welcomed the push to rethink my tactical approach and to challenge the loadout that I had thought was the best for me.

The Surge has the same "lost wallet challenge" made popular by Bloodborne and the Souls games; when you die you lose all your tech scrap in one pile where you died. As you respawn from the previously visited Ops room, you can attempt to reach your tech scrap pile to collect it back without penalty. But if you die before collecting it, the whole pile is lost forever. The Surge also imposes a two-and-half-minute time limit for reaching your lost scrap pile. To make the limit fair, killing a hostile grants you extra 20 seconds so that you have a chance of collecting the pile even from a longer distance.

Pile of tech scrap from my previous incarnation waits impatiently to be picked up.

I never found this mechanic terribly meaningful. The common argument for it is to create extra tension for the player. The pile of tech scrap is the bet in the player's gamble of surviving back to where he was without dying. The practical side is that if the player is in need of tech scrap then the sensible way to gather it is to grind hostiles that pose little to no risk. Rarely is the pile of tech scrap so big that you couldn't gather that amount and more in 15 minutes without significant risk.

The Surge does give in from  Bloodborne's hard-core implementation of this lost wallet challenge in multiple ways. First of all, you can always deposit your tech scrap at the Ops. Deposited scrap cannot be lost. Two things discourage the player from depositing scrap all the time; when you deposit your scrap, all hostiles respawn and you lose your accumulating tech scrap multiplier. I found this soft approach much more palatable compared to Bloodborne. I felt more in control of my gameplay. Whereas Bloodborne would have forced me to play cautiously, The Surge let me deposit my tech scrap and concentrate fully on exploring the world without concern of losing a large amount of tech scrap.

To be fair, I must mention that there were one or two times when I did die with a large amount of tech scrap and felt it exhilarating to try to find my way back to the same spot within the time limit.

The story kept me curious

There is dialogue with normal human beings. It makes the game world so much more believable. I might have not liked the game as much if it didn't have these small moments of humanity in it. You discover a few normal people who are as confused about what's happening as you are. Many of them you can help in small ways. But the bulk of your journey you have to make by yourself. Seeing peaceful NPCs in the game world and having short dialogues with them was a very nice touch. I'm personally quite sensitive to oppressive tones in games, and at times The Surge was on the brink of being overwhelming. Seeing a few friendly faces here and there definitely helped me keep playing the game.

Davey is one of the few peaceful characters that offer little side quests.

There are many audio logs to discover all over the game world. They form small independent stories. Some stories tell about people who are trying to survive in the company after the accident. Others let you try to patch together what really happened. Some stories are about minor events that were taking place at the company, such as a secret gambling ring about drone fighting.

(Major spoiler alert.) After finishing the game I still didn't quite understand what was the cause of the great accident. Apparently the nanotechnology and cybernetic experiments at CREO got out of control and resulted in a sentient being. Internal conflicts at the company were definitely one part of the accident but the final straw seemed to be Sally, the assisting AI of the executive board. Warren himself also seemed to be part of the whole mess, perhaps acting as the avatar or agent of the newly born sentient being. The ending that I got suggested that, as things got out of control at CREO, security personnel that entered the premises were taken down by Warren, and atmosphere-altering payloads kept being delivered to space. (End of spoiler alert.)

A slightly different and more thorough interpretation of the plot can be found here: thesurge.wiki.fextralife.com/Story. It was also interesting to find out that The Surge was partly inspired by the 1994 fighting game Rise of the Robots [article on OnlySP]. The plot of RotR does seem to fit the events of The Surge.

Overall, The Surge surprised me positively. I certainly didn't expect to be playing it past the first hour but ended up spending over 50 hours into it. Exploration and tactical combat were the highlights for me. I'm looking forward to The Surge 2 which is to be released in September 2019.

-Ville