The Surge is a metallic Souls-like with his own identity. It’s not perfect, but it worth the price.

The frustrating boss fights and the mediocre plot are blemishes on what is, by and large, a much better game than I ever would have expected. When I reviewed Lords of the Fallen in 2014, I said it was "a surprising show of skill and hopefully a sign of much brighter things to come." By building on its more obvious inspirations with a more unique vision, Deck13 has fulfilled even more of that initial promise with The Surge.

The Surge is a surprise, utilizing its near future sci-fi setting to create a unique world that is a wonder to explore and uncover. Though its story fails to take off, the awesome combat and engaging crafting and upgrade system are more than enough to make the game stand out amidst the increasing gaming landscape.

Despite what you may think, The Surge is not a Dark Souls little brother, nor does it want to be. Sometimes the AI can be disappointing (or too difficult to beat), but it has its own personality, a good industrial level design, and a pretty deep narrative.

Deck 13 took what they learnt from working on Lords of the Fallen and added their own ideas to allow The Surge to be more than a pure Dark Souls clone. The combat is fantastic, engaging, and features a neat limb target system, and the skill progression is refreshingly open to experimentation, but the overall experience is sadly hampered by the lack of enemy variety and a monotonous sci-fi location, which has so much potential wasted with the current industrial environment. Even with those faults, The Surge is a better game than Lords of the Fallen, and one that I can recommend to fans of the popularised action RPG subgenre, because there is a good, fun experience to be had with The Surge, and some of its unique ideas bring solid additions to From Software’s concrete formula.

Deck 13 have vastly improved upon their formula, and hopefully, this is a sign of great things to come. But for now, The Surge falls short of being anything more than a serviceable title that sticks to what it knows.

The Surge does a lot of things well, and has some pleasant and unique twists on the usual conventions of this relatively young genre. The problem is that it gets a lot of the basics and balance painfully wrong, resulting in an experience that’s a little dull, repeatedly infuriating, and frustrated by poor design decisions. It doesn’t do enough wrong to make it an outright bad game, but it’s one that should be approached with caution even by ardent fans of the genre.