![]() ![]() There are several vast zones in the world, housing all kinds of secrets, shortcuts and bifurcating routes. Jericho City is a more open and sprawling setting than the original game’s factory complex. ![]() But by the latter stages I was ploughing through most bosses first time-no doubt helped by my plucky levelling and the fact that most later bosses are somewhat uninspired higher-level repeats of earlier ones. ![]() Later on however, the way I distributed my stats and implants-overwhelmingly focused around battery efficiency, energy replenishment and health injectors-made me virtually unstoppable by the time I reached the final third of the game, draining much of the mid-game momentum.Įarly boss encounters are the right kind of gruelling, resulting in a healthy amount of deaths, expletives and subsequent mastery on my part. My early forays into the docklands area of Port Nixon and later the verdant artificial wilderness of Gideon’s Rock led to dozens of deaths and poundings of my gamepad against the nearest soft surface as new enemy types forced serious shifts in my combat approach. Particularly in the early going, there’s not a lot of leeway for error as enemy blows can easily stagger you, and an over-reliance on blocking or frantic attacking will leave you short of stamina and vulnerable.īut the difficulty curve is an uneven one. The Surge 2 punishes complacency, hastiness and hesitation. Where with Sekiro From Software has largely moved on from the classic Dark Souls combat system, Deck13 has successfully managed to imbue it with more depth in The Surge 2, which is an impressive feat. The game cleverly disincentivises panicked button-mashing by preserving your stamina if you time your strikes properly, and there’s now a well-implemented directional parrying system which can leave enemies open for counter-attacks. Taking out a particularly tricky-bastard enemy by roundhouse-kicking their head clean off or halving them at the waist with a weaponised buzzsaw has been one of the most cathartic gaming mechanics of 2019 for me. How likely you are to hit a given limb depends on whether you use vertical or horizontal swings, and once you’ve worn a limb down enough you can carry out a slow-mo finishing move that cuts it off.Įven after executing these finishers however-many hundred times, the variety of animations for each weapon and elegant flow between combat and finisher means it never gets old. You can chop-and-change them at any time, helping you really refine your build and playstyle.Īs with the original game, you can target-lock each of an enemy’s individual limbs, aiming for unarmoured parts for quicker kills, or for armoured parts if you want to gain metal alloys used for crafting armour. ![]() These implants can stack in interesting ways, granting you energy for taking damage for example, or giving you multiple boosts for successful parries. As you level up, you gain extra slots to fill with implants that either boost certain stats or grant you ‘injectors’, which use your battery cells to replenish health or offer small stat bonuses in damage, defence and so on. The implant system feeds into this malleability. There will be a little bit of farming required to gather the necessary pieces for new armour and weapon upgrades, but it’s a fair price to pay for radically changing up your playstyle mid-game. The weapons-ranging from clanging electric-charged gauntlets to angular chunks of metal that look like spare crane parts-are so brash and brawny that you want to play around with all of them, and the game does a good job of pushing you to do so by confronting you with a solid variety of enemy types with different attack patterns and weaknesses. Once you’ve worn a limb down enough you can carry out a slow-mo finishing move that cuts it off. The good news is that without fiddly RPG stats to worry about, and an option to redistribute your basic stats at any time, you don’t need to wait for a new run of the game to experiment with different builds. ![]()
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