If anyone has read my review of The Surge, I had reviewed the game from a critical standpoint and gave it a very respectable 8.5 due to some of the minor flaws in the game. You can read that review here.
Now, I hear you say: “So Luke, what is the point of this article? How can an 8.5 be your Game of the Year?!”… Well my good friends, that is something I am going to try to explain because there is just….something that keeps me chomping at the bits as I delve deeper and deeper into CREO industries.
As I wrote my aforementioned review of The Surge there were many times I just felt as though I struggled a bit to be able to play more than 2-3 hours of it at a time – I think this is due to the fact that no matter how hard I tried not to, I just kept on making comparisons between the Soulsborne games and this without being able to take a step back and realise that this is…something else entirely.
As I learned the mechanics that drove The Surge forwards I found my average play time per session would increase, for example as I learned the proficiency scaling of the weapons I was able to quickly work up these scalings in order to give my Warren a more balanced build, increasing the amount of time for an average session to around 4-5 hours a go, up until this Sunday just past where before I knew it I was in the depths of a 12 hour session showing no signs of stopping.
I honestly cannot quite put my finger on it but there is something addictive about lopping off limbs in The Surge, something that continually drives me forwards through the CREO facility, something that woke me up half an hour earlier than I normally do before work today just to play as much as I possibly could.
Alongside all this – One of the most addictive things about the game is that it tells you nothing, literally nothing at all about how to play the game, so every moment I get I find myself crawling through the Reddit pages to learn all the secrets that it is hiding from me, all the little tips that the game is hiding behind closed doors. This is possibly the smartest thing that these types of games do to keep you interested, as even when you aren’t playing the game it is fresh in your mind just making you wish you could keep going back.
In my review, I mentioned that the bosses never seemed frightening to me or posed TOO much of a challenge. What I didn’t touch on however was the absolute spectacle that wows you as you play – Unlike the bosses in similar games, where you can learn the patterns early in the fight and get through the whole fight, the bosses in The Surge all have multiple phases which will throw you off at varying parts of the fight – The biggest that springs to mind is the fight with the first of the three (I think, according to the trophy) Big Sisters, seriously watch how many phases this fucking thing has:
There are definitely flaws in The Surge, but no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to put it down, no matter how stressed out I get with the game I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.
If you are putting off picking up the Surge because you don’t think it will live up to Dark Souls then I urge you to pick it up today – keep playing and you will not be disappointed.
Plus it’s fucking beautiful.