

Some weapons are better suited to certain situations, but ultimately it comes down to how you want to approach combat. Smartly, no weapons are simply outright better than the others, meaning your choice of armament comes down to a combination of what you've managed to find, which particular mix of moveset and stats suit your preferred playstyle, and to a lesser extent the nature of the obstacle you're trying to overcome.

All spears, for example, have the same long reach and forward thrusting attacks, but this one hits slightly quicker for less damage while that one consumes more stamina per attack but delivers bonus electrical damage every hit. Movesets are shared across a weapon class but various stats-such as base damage, stamina consumption or additional damage types-serve to differentiate unique weapons within the same class. There are dozens of weapons to be wielded in one hand or two and each can be deployed in heavy and light attacks as well as combos that alternate between the two. And there's the necessity of learning to read enemy attack patterns-one may be quick and aggressive, while another is slower and turtles behind a shield, and a third may hang back and takes pot shots.Ĭombat is almost exclusively focused on melee attacks. There's the ability to manage multiple enemies when any one of them alone is dangerous enough to be life-threatening if you're not careful. There's the element of stamina management you'd expect-you've got to understand when you can commit and when you need to pull back and recover. Your pursuit of the elusive young girl is essentially the pretext for exploring the multi-faceted and interconnected districts of Jericho City and whacking nearly all of its inhabitants in the face.įighting in The Surge 2 feels strategic and skillful. There's not a great deal to the story and what little there is quickly reduces to stale sci-fi musings about the relationship between humans and machines and all sorts of hackneyed military-industrial complex pot-boiling. Soon you're having sporadic visions of a young girl, the granddaughter of the CEO of nanotech firm CREO Industries, who you're sure was also on the plane and now appears to have been kidnapped by a mysterious security force. You were also on the plane, yet somehow survived the crash and, at the start of the game, wake up in the medical wing of the Jericho City Police Department. On board was some sort of nanotechnology that triggers an environmental disaster requiring a city-wide quarantine and leaving those infected to wander the streets with a permanently hostile demeanor. Lackluster world-building, forgettable characters and cringeworthy dialogue all conspire against persuading you this is a world worth saving.

Yet where The Surge 2's blushes are not spared is in giving you a reason to care about anything you're doing.
#THE SURGE 2 BEST SPEAR SOFTWARE#
On a purely mechanical level, the robust combat engine, intricate level design and substantive gear, and crafting systems all leave The Surge 2 far from embarrassed by the From Software comparison.
#THE SURGE 2 BEST SPEAR SERIES#
But as with the Souls series and its ilk, this isn't really a game about clearing an area and leveling up it's about learning through repetition and deepening your understanding of the game. And sure, you have to make it back to where you died to recover your tech scrap (read: souls). Sure, when you die or rest at a medbay (read: bonfire) all the enemies respawn and many of them can kill you in a couple of hits. It's a hard game in the sense that it demands patience and attention to detail, but it's not especially punishing. Yes, The Surge 2 is that kind of game: an action RPG with a looping, labyrinthine structure and a heavy debt owed to Dark Souls. Roughly a dozen hours later you will find yourself standing on the other side of this door before opening it and returning to the very place in which you began, keenly aware of how far you've progressed while not really traveling anywhere at all. Up a short flight of stairs and down an alleyway from the initial hub of the first major area in The Surge 2 is a door that can only be opened from the other side.
