#The surge 2 armor update#
#The surge 2 armor upgrade#

Abrams’ mystery box storytelling, without the benefit of decent actors to carry the plot along. Everyone speaks vaguely about how the girl’s important, but there’s no real hook. After you both survive a plane crash, your character starts having visions of the girl’s journey in the form of “echoes,” temporal imprints on the world that only you can see. A young girl you track down is the real center of attention, but we have no reason to care about her either.

It paints your efforts as so nihilistically pointless you just can’t care about the story or your choices. Almost anything you do, even with good intentions, makes the world worse. Your mute, customizable protagonist is equally bland. But most devolve into questionable tropes like a crazed southern woman who chews people up for meat she sells Sweeney Todd-style. Some sidequests at least pose a unique challenge, such as racing against the clock to recover vital medicine from an enemy camp. The story offers almost no motivation to keep going. The Surge 2 is nowhere near pleasant enough to warrant engaging with it.

#The surge 2 armor upgrade#

Once you have enough of each upgrade material, you can stop dismembering enemies until you face an opponent of a new rank, meaning you’ll spend plenty of time ignoring the game’s central mechanic. Pairing it with a suit of armor that removed the cost of battery energy for executing enemies meant I never needed to look at my gear tab ever again. You can always earn more experience by culling an area for five minutes, which is made easy by an early-game dual-rigged nanite weapon that melts opponents so fast I legitimately wondered if I’d found endgame gear by mistake.Īfter I acquired this nanite weapon, every other implement in the game became useless. Shops rarely sell anything of value, and there’s little benefit in selling items to them for a meager amount of experience points. You just repeatedly upgrade your favorite items by cutting corresponding limbs off opponents. The progression system further rewards sticking with your first pieces of gear rather than changing things up. This appears to be a balancing oversight that made me feel like I was cheating. After this point, death mostly comes from stun-locking enemies rather than player error. This means you are constantly feeding yourself more health, to the point the health bar becomes irrelevant. Another implant grants health regeneration for building up batteries. Several of The Surge 2 ’s early implants allow you to also earn battery energy for being hit or dismembering enemies. In both Surge games, you have access to modular upgrades you can swap out on the fly, called implants. That’s not me bragging, but a serious concern about how The Surge 2 ’s own health system is balanced.Ĭharacters earn medical injections (aka health packs) by generating battery charges, which are initially earned by striking enemies. Later on, not even stats stopped me from beating significantly higher-level opponents. Enemies don’t pose nearly enough of a threat unless they’ve got a clear statistical advantage. The camera breaks in boss fights and often struggles in tighter environments, wildly zooming in and out. Then it’s an action RPG like Diablo where stats matter more than actually understanding your opponents. Then it’s a spectacle fighter like Devil May Cry with a secondary pistol weapon and gigantic fighting arenas.

One moment, it’s a proper Souls-like with slow encounters against one or two opponents. Rather than settle for one type of third-person melee combat, The Surge 2 crams them all in.

#The surge 2 armor update#

What starts as a promising update to Deck13’s dismemberment-centric Souls-like series steadily devolves into an unfinished, incomprehensible mess. It’s shocking just how incoherent The Surge 2 is.