The Surge (PlayStation 4) review "Just another day at the workplace!"

As I've gotten older, I've also become a bit less openly demonstrative while gaming. When I was a teen, I remember an occurrence or three when my mom yelled at me to turn my Nintendo off and do something useful with my time due to me slamming a fist into the floor and yelling incoherently because I *checks notes* gave up an untimely hit in one baseball game or another. Now that I'm a middle-aged adult, though, I tend to keep things to the occasional muttered expletive. Okay, okay…frequent and maybe a bit louder than muttered, but the point remains the same — I don't completely fly off the handle whenever something happens in whatever game I'm playing.

Which makes my reaction to finally toppling the final boss of Deck13's The Surge a bit surprising to me. After suffering death after death after death to it after a few dozen hours of me suffering death after death after death to various other challenges in this "Souls-like" game, I finally was able to squeak out a victory by a fairly narrow margin. Did I take this glorious victory in stride, remembering how many times I'd failed in this endeavor before eventually succeeding? Not even close. I jumped up off my sofa, flipped my controller, delivered the mother of all emphatic index finger pointing at the television screen and spontaneously yelled out stuff along the lines of "Who's the man, now? WHO?!?!"

Personally, I'm glad I was home alone. That' sort of behavior can be a bit tricky to explain to most people…

But that's why I've gotten hooked on those "Souls-like" games. If they're done right, nothing else really can give me that sort of adrenaline boost where my soul can ascend to the highest of highs and descend to the lowest of lows repeatedly over the course of an hour or two. The Surge might not be on the level of FROM Software's output, but it knew how to push my buttons and did so with sadistic glee.

You control a dude named Warren, who just got his dream job. You see, he is confined to a wheelchair, but because he got hired at the huge CREO corporation, he's going to get fitted in an Exo-Suit rig. This thing is essentially a form of computerized power armor that will grant him mobility as long as he's wearing it and hooked into CREO's system.

It doesn't take long for him to realize this dream is actually a nightmare. First, there's a slight glitch in the system while he's getting his Exo-Suit grafted onto his body, allowing fun stuff like drills going through his body to happen while he's still conscious and can feel everything. After passing out from the pain, he then wakes up to find himself being dragged through a junkyard by a drone for disposal. Fortunately, he's able to grab a makeshift weapon and dispatch his robotic executioner, but then discovers that chaos has come to CREO. Most of the Exo-Suit-wearing employees have gone homicidally insane, while the drones and other robots aren't any friendlier. Instead of starting a new job, Warren is now in a fight for survival as he looks for a way out, answers as to what is happening and other non-insane survivors.

This game could best be described as a slightly clunkier and vastly more futuristic Dark Souls. Still, it's a notable step up from Deck13's previous "Souls-like", Lords of the Fallen. The problem with that game — aside from its clunkiness — was that a diligent person could eventually break it, resulting in a game that started out quite challenging, but got easier and easier as time passed. That will not happen in The Surge. At times, I felt like things were swinging in my favor, as I'd travel long distances and accomplish a lot without even dying once. And then, I'd encounter a new enemy or confront the game's next boss or venture into a new region and, next thing I know, I'm receiving a powerful lesson in humility.

The main reason for this is simple: The Surge never lets you get too powerful. You can find the best rig in the game, which allows you to attach up to 16 implants to give you extra health and stamina, a whole bunch of health-restoring injections, combat bonuses and other forms of assistance. You can obtain and fully power up a great set of armor. You can grind for level after level after level. And the amount of help you'll receive from your work is minimal. I did all of this and, still, some attacks by the final couple bosses (as well as a few regular enemies) could easily remove half my life bar. In a genre of games where the ability to read an enemy's movements and react accordingly is absolutely crucial, this one still manages to stand out because you'll routinely have so little margin for error that any slip-up ensures your stash of health restorers will deplete by one.

And you'll have to diligently work to even have a chance of being on the right side of this game's difficulty curve. While you'll find a lot of weapons by scouring the various sections of CREO's facility, armor is obtained a different way. Whenever you fight someone, you'll be able to pick what body part to target. Hitting parts not covered by armor will allow you to kill those foes more quickly, but if you focus your attack on an armored part, you'll get the ability to perform a finishing blow that severs that section and grants you a schematic for it, as well as components used to build and improve it. You'll also want to collect and equip every piece of whatever armor set you prefer, as by doing so, you'll get some sort of bonus. For example, my late-game armor of choice was the Gorgon set, which gets dropped by CREO's imposing force of security guards. Equip the full set and your stamina regenerates more quickly, allowing you to attack and dodge more frequently.

After finding Lords of the Fallen to be a tolerable experience that wasn't really anything special, I was impressed by how much more I enjoyed The Surge. That's not to say it's a perfect game — it's just a pretty good one in a genre that's become a bit of an obsession for me over the past few years. Like I said, it plays like a clunkier version of a FROM Software game where everything works, but is not as polished as its inspiration. There are a lot of narrow paths with no railings, making it distressingly easy to plummet to your death because you got in a fight and your momentum from an attack sent you over the edge. There are only five boss fights, which is a bit of a letdown considering how these games tend to put a lot of emphasis on those confrontations. Hell, there really aren't that many different kinds of enemy to fight, with many of them being insane rig-wearing humans that just happen to be wearing different sorts of armor or wielding different weapons.

But I'd call my time with The Surge a pretty positive experience. It did a good job of scratching that Souls itch with its high level of difficulty and environments that gradually open up as you access doors taking you back to previously-visited locations. And there's no doubt that it got under my skin to the degree I considered the act of overcoming its challenges to have gotten pretty damn personal. At least that's my explanation for how over-the-top and emphatic my glorious celebration was when I finally crossed the finish line!

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (August 25, 2023) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.