 I'm gonna keep this quick, I swear at this time, for real. Deck 13's third attempt at an entry in the still very new soul genre released last week. And I'm gonna keep it short because I've got a lot of other games to get to, as well as a video about politics that I'm working on right now. And really because there isn't all that much to say beyond just kind of commenting on its quality. A brief history. Deck 13 is a small German development house that has apparently been around in one form or another for 18 years now. For the first 14 of those years, they were churning out yearly obscure titles for PC. Titles so obscure you get stuff like this when you search them up on Wikipedia. Things like point and click adventures and strategy games. As well as titanically poorly received action games. When doing the brief little research about Deck 13's catalog, a few things became clear. One, they've had a frantic search for a formula that would allow them to find some success. And two, total and abject failure. So total has the failure been that I find it fairly impossible to believe they've managed to stay in business. Their recent output had been games either so obscure there is literally zero information about them on the internet or games like Venetica. An action RPG that got reviewers saying things like this. Game games like this here. Blood Knights. Right up until 2013, Deck 13 seemed like they were going to be unable to find a formula that worked for them. And then, the very next year, they decided to try yet another genre with the release of Lords of the Fallen. One of the first attempts at a Souls game by a studio other than from software. Now Lords of the Fallen was a very flawed game. And combat was stiff and clunky and the game just felt bad to play. But it still managed to prove that there was an untapped market for these games beyond just Souls. It obviously did well enough despite its many and manifest flaws to warrant immediately beginning to work on a new title. And for the first time in studio history apparently, taking more than a year to make it. I mean seriously, look at this list of releases. The Surge released three years later in 2017 and it is, in my opinion, a pretty good game. A game that clearly has more than enough positives to make up for some of its very serious negatives. First the positives. The Surge had an interesting world and an interesting enough story. It looked really nice and its combat was good enough to keep me playing all the way through. The Surge's big new feature was that in order to find and upgrade gear, you had to sever it from an opponent with flashy gory finisher moves. There are some serious negatives to the first game, however. Level variety was bad. Enemy variety is kinda non-existent. Combat was still pretty clunky and slow at times and difficulty spikes were wild and erratic. And on top of all that, bosses were just bad. But I, like many other players, liked the Souls formula so much that even a relatively mediocre entry will keep me playing. And that's what happened with the Surge. Combat and Game Field. The Surge 2 is almost certainly Deck 13's first unambiguously good game. Almost every issue that was present in the first game, and especially in Lords of the Fallen, has at least tried to be addressed here in the second game. First of all, if the first Surge was Dark Souls, the Surge 2 is Bloodborne. The game is significantly easier than the first entry, but not so easy you can be careless. And combat is far, far faster and extremely flashy. The careful plotting against zombie bots you had in the first game has been replaced by extremely fluid and fast-paced combat here. It just feels really good to move and fight. And I'm happy to say, sprinting uses barely any stamina at all, so you can get around the map really quickly. There is a tremendous amount of weapons and a surprisingly wide variety of movesets and combos. This can be tricky to get used to because unlike in Dark Souls, two button presses might actually have you attacking three or more times, but once you've gotten a feel for a weapon, the combat here feels unique in a way the previous two games simply did not. On top of that, enemy variety is really good. It's not Dark Souls 3, but it's not a AAA developer either. New enemy types are introduced from beginning right up until New Game Plus, which we will talk about a bit. One of the overlooked aspects of enemies in Souls-like games is that they need to feel like they are placed with care. The Surge 1 often felt like enemies were just plonked all over the map, just waiting passively for you. The Surge 2 manages to pull off something that's pretty rare in any game really, making enemies feel like they're supposed to be where they are. This is hard to explain, but immersion in a game world happens because you start to believe the world around you is real. Dark Souls pulls this off because every area you enter, the enemies feel like they belong uniquely there. Think of Cainhurst Castle in Bloodborne and how perfectly every enemy in that level fits the aesthetic and the narrative of the level. The Surge 2 starts to get this right. The game feels like real thought and effort has gone into designing the world, the levels, and the enemies you encounter there. Because of this, the game feels like a journey rather than a series of industrial corridors. And when you add up enemy variety, enemy design, and a thoughtfully created game world, you get something legitimately good. I not once got bored with the Surge 2 and that is a big leap forward for Deck 13. Levels and bosses The first Surge had you moving through an industrial complex. I'm sure this was a budgetary issue, but the game just did not have much variety in its environments at all. There are only so many factories you can play in before you get bored of factories. The Surge 2 just does not have this problem. The game world is relatively small and square footage I guess, but you'll be dying enough that the game takes more than 25 or 30 hours. And it's broken into several interconnected levels that are all distinct and tell a story. From a jail, to downtown, to a power plant, to a nature preserve, the map is great looking and interesting in its art design. And near the end of the game, the entire map is transformed as you fight your way back through it. It is a great looking map that managed to feel like a real place which is a huge accomplishment for any game developer. The Surge 2's map also clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the first Dark Souls in that it is one large interconnected map, not discrete levels, and you'll be backtracking through it over and over. Now, here is where my first real complaint about the game pops up though. The Surge 2 has a ridiculously complicated map, like an infuriatingly complex map filled with multiple levels and elevators and skylines. It tips from exploration to just being straight up frustratingly lost a lot of the time. It is my single biggest gripe with an otherwise excellent game. It's very coy about what the hell you're supposed to be doing at any given time, and it's arranged again like the first souls in that you can go anywhere right from the beginning. But holy crap is it a convoluted mess. I never ever look up guides for souls like games, but the feeling of fucking off and being lost made me several times google what I was supposed to be doing and where I was supposed to be going. That's a problem. It took me out of the game. Now Dark Souls also doesn't tell you where to go, but the maps are in general very simple and linear. There are shortcuts and dead ends, but there aren't like 13 looping paths that leave you sure you've seen that rubble pile three times before. And this actually wouldn't even be a problem if not for one thing. The Surge is set in a very far future with space travel and nanobots, but one that apparently has lost the technology of maps. There are occasionally totally fucking useless maps on the wall, but they tell you nothing. It's like needing to find a store and a guy giving you a map of the US with only the states. It is functionally useless and its presence only made me more pissed off. Now I'm torn here because the maps and levels are impressively built and cleverly put together, and there is a ton to explore. If they just had a fucking map, I would be praising it. And there's like no downside to giving me a map. Because again, exploration and getting lost are two totally different things. You explore because you want to. You get lost despite not wanting to. The next game just needs a map is what I'm saying, it's the future. I think a map would come standard with my nano-bot infused exoskeleton killing machine. Phones here in the present all come with one, so yeah. As for bosses, there are a bunch of them and they vary wildly in quality. Actually, the visual design and variety is on point. Every boss feels like it belongs where it does and all of them look cool. The only issue with design is animations. Any good Souls game requires very clear animations so that the player can learn. Several bosses here in the Surge 2 have animations that feel janky or like they are missing frames. There's one boss that you fight several times that has a bite attack that looks like he's lagging. This is unbelievably frustrating, it just feels sloppy. I understand the difficulty requires bosses that can kill you, but this is better accomplished by a wider moveset from bosses. Rather than having several attacks with animations so fast, I'm incapable of dealing with them without spamming dodge. It ends up feeling cheap. Also, the camera gets borked against some bosses but that's apparently the nature of the Beast in Souls games. I still hate it but it is what it is and it apparently is not changing anytime soon. It must be very difficult. Still, overall, there are several really memorable bosses and they are miles better than the first game that had you fighting three different bosses. Progression and RPG Mechanics The Surge 2 keeps the dismember enemies to get their shit mechanic and it is even better here. Animations are fun enough that it's never annoying and the actual variety is cool enough to keep you harvesting arms and skulls all the way to the end. I will say however on the progression side, I would prefer more stats so that there's more freedom and builds. In the Surge 2 you've got health, stamina, and battery. And three stats simply isn't enough in my opinion for an RPG like this. It's not some huge problem but it is an area that can be improved. Strength, dexterity, stamina, health, and battery would be ideal. More stats that require players to make choices. Now, progression is smooth but you won't be making any choices or agonizing over your level up screen here. Maybe some people like that but my biggest issue with Sekiro was the lack of RPG mechanics. I like RPG mechanics. I like making builds and playing with different things and respect my character. I like being locked out of a weapon or armor because I had a speck into something else. That's just simply not here. If you don't care about that, you'll probably like the Surge 2 even more. But you know, it is what it is. Now what's not debatable is inventory management is pure hot steaming shit. A big stinky pile of horrendous menu navigation. So god awful that by hour 30 it is still a steaming mess that's almost impossible to understand. You can't sell or scrap or even vault the stuff you pick up. So by the end of the game I had like 45 weapons and the sorting tool is utter garbage. Totally useless. Finding a weapon is actually difficult in the menu. Over and over it has to scroll multiple times through three pages of weapons to find what I was looking for. Why? Why can't I sell the stuff I will literally never use? I had like 16 hammers that I never once used. It's annoying and pointless and it sucks and I made the game actively less enjoyable every time I pressed the menu key. It needs improvements, badly. The only other major flaw the game has in my opinion is that by the end and certainly in New Game Plus, enemies have titanic amounts of health. Now obviously in a game like this having enemies have more health is a way to ramp up the difficulty. However, in the last level and the first few levels of New Game Plus, enemies regular mob enemies actually required 15, 16, 17 hits to kill. That just seems outrageous to me. It's just too much. That's a balance issue that hopefully can be addressed later or in the next game, but either way. And in otherwise really cool New Game Plus in that it brings new enemies and changes up placement and stuff, it got so much that by, I don't know, halfway through my New Game Plus I stopped playing because it got boring. Otherwise though, it kept me happily playing all the way up to there and I do plan on playing it again. Wrapping up. The Surge 2, despite several flaws and the small size and hilarious history of the studio who made it is a good game, a game to recommend, it nails what it needs to and its faceplants are in places that don't ruin the whole package. If you like Souls games, you will like this. If you liked the first, the second is immensely better. If you did not play the Surge 1, I wouldn't even bother unless you have EA origin where it's free. The Surge 2 is the Surge, but with every system improved from graphics to story to combat. It's well above average. It's not a masterpiece. It's not a can't miss this game triumph, but it's a solid product, well worth its price and a third straight improvement for a studio that is a curiously late bloomer. I'm actually excited to see what they make next. And as I've said several times, it's important to support games like this, these mid-budget double A games. If we don't want to live in a world that only has Call of Duty and Celeste, when games like this come out, they need to be praised and bought. So again, if you like Souls games, I highly recommend checking out the Surge 2. It's one of the best games I've played this year. Alright, see you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye.