The Surge - The Good, the Bad and the Augmented (DLC)

The Surge is Deck13's attempt to transplant the Souls formula into a near-future industrial hellscape, and it mostly works on its own gritty terms. You play a newcomer at CREO, a megacorporation with suspiciously vague world-saving ambitions, who wakes up after a catastrophic incident welded into a heavy exoskeleton with no memory of how things went sideways. From there it is all limb-targeting, gear-crafting, and carefully timed dodges through rusted corridors full of malfunctioning workers and security drones. The core loop is satisfying in a way that will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has put time into the Soulsborne catalogue, but the industrial aesthetic and the limb-severing mechanic give it a distinct identity worth paying attention to. The combat is the clearest strength here. Targeting specific body parts mid-fight serves a dual purpose: aim for an armored limb to harvest the schematic and craft that piece yourself, or go for an unarmored zone to end a fight faster. That tension between efficiency and greed drives almost every encounter and it keeps combat from feeling like simple stat-checking. Weapon classes cover single rigged weapons, twin-rigged, heavy-duty, spears, and staff types, each with genuinely different move sets and stamina rhythms. Build variety is real, at least through the mid-game, though late-game enemy scaling does nudge you toward min-maxing in ways that flatten some of the earlier creativity. Where The Surge stumbles is in its world design and writing. The narrative is thin gruel compared to the genre's best - CREO has atmosphere but the story never commits to its corporate-dystopia premise with enough specificity to make the lore feel earned. NPC interactions are sparse and mostly transactional. If you come in expecting the environmental storytelling density of Dark Souls or the dialogue depth of anything Larian has ever touched, you will be disappointed. The level layout can also feel like a maze in the least rewarding sense: shortcuts that do not quite connect the way you hoped, and backtracking that occasionally tips from challenging into tedious. The DLC content included here, The Good, the Bad and the Augmented, leans into a deliberately campy game-show aesthetic that is a tonal whiplash from the base game's grimy seriousness. It offers a series of arena-style challenge rooms with modifier options that let you adjust enemy behavior and damage values, which adds replayability for players who want to stress-test builds. It is not substantial enough to anchor a purchase on its own, but it adds genuine mechanical variety for players already committed to the base experience. Boss fights here range from clever to frustrating with not much in between, which is probably an honest summary of the whole package. The Surge sits comfortably in that tier of Souls-adjacent games that are worth your time if the genre already has its hooks in you, but are unlikely to convert skeptics. The limb system is smart, the industrial setting is underused but evocative, and the combat has enough texture to stay interesting for a solid playthrough. Just do not expect the narrative to pull its weight.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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