The Surge was one of my favourite games of 2017. Inspired by the Soulsborne series, the game had its own take on the way it worked with absolutely stellar combat and an incredibly interesting world – It really stood head and shoulders above the rest of the Soulsborne inspired games released this year, in my opinion.
For my review of the base game click here!
The only weakness of The Surge, however, were the lack of enemy varieties found in the game; essentially there were a handful of difficult to beat robots, but mostly the game was filled with other exo-suit users that looked and fought similar to our main character, Warren, which could make the later hours of the game feel a little stale when fighting the same enemies over and over… However this is an issue that A Walk In The Park fixes very well by breaking up the main game with a few ventures into the theme park of Creo-World.
So here is my story of A Walk In The Park DLC… Which is certainly not a walk in the park by any means, as the name might suggest… My first task was actually getting there on my New Game+ playthrough, which was a monumental task in-of-itself – Here I was starting NG+ and thinking rather cockily that I could smash through the first level in 30 mins or so in order to enter the DLC rather quickly… 6 hours later I had just beaten the first boss and was dashing towards the brightly designed train that would whisk me off to “Creo-World” promising me to be “a day I wouldn’t forget”.
When I finally entered Creo-World, not really knowing what to expect, I was delighted by the bright colours I was greeted with – These were a nice break from the dark world I had become used to in my initial playthrough of the game, and helped to bring some much needed variety to The Surge’s environments – Immediately the first thing I did was admire the world around me, staring at all the brightly designed posters and the fantastic looking surroundings… Not noticing the fucking donut flying towards me, wanting my death.
This is where the DLC really shines – While there are the standard exosuit enemies littered throughout (The bigger ones oneshotted me more than once), you are also attacked by Creo-Worlds mascots that have gone a little mental. I took great joy in being attacked by a donut or a chocolate bar at regular intervals until I cut all their heads off and built them for myself, which I THEN had a lot of fun with attacking everyone dressed up as a chocolate bar on a murdering spree, cutting people in half and harvesting their parts for myself.
The new weaponry and armour shine above many of the base-game’s equipment, but the issue I ran into here is that I had one of the endgame weapons which did tons of damage and was relatively quick at the same time, so I didn’t find myself bothering to level up any of the new equipment. With this weapon in hand, I thought I would be relatively overpowered for the DLC when considering how early into the game you can access it, however in true Soulsborne fashion I found myself getting destroyed more often than I had the upper hand, despite my advantages.
One section of the DLC which has really stood out to me was fairly early on where I was locked in a room and attacked by a few waves of enemies who came at me 4 at a time (2 small drones and 2 suited enemies) which really destroyed my usual tactic of baiting one of them at a time into a wide open space to pick them off on my terms – Instead I was locked into a small room with little movement hoping I would make it through alive, struggling to evade and adapt; this type of quick gameplay shift was a welcome addition to the game that ripped me out from my comfort zone just as I was getting used to enemy patterns.
I won’t go too in depth on the bosses of A Walk In The Park because I know (From personal experience) that this is where the real spoilers lie for people, what I will say is that they are a real breath of fresh air that provided and incredible challenge with an exceptional feeling of accomplishment once I had overcome each one… I just wish there were more of them.
This is where my only issue lies with the DLC really, I just wished there was more of it. It felt jarring upon finishing the sections in Creo-World and then going back to the dark, dank world I had left behind. It just made me wish more of the game was like A Walk In The Park.
All in all, I found that A Walk In The Park fixed nigh on all the issues I had with the vanilla build of the game and I really enjoyed the stark colours in contrast to the rest of the game; a bit more length to it and perhaps a few more bosses and it would have been a perfect DLC but all in all I would rate it a solid:
8.5/10
If you want to see the first 30 minutes of A Walk In The Park then check out the video below and watch Luke as he stumbles his way through the opening section.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcrUNaAdDFQ]