Test de The Surge 2

In 2014, Deck 13 declared its love for Souls-Like and released the friendly Lord of The Fallen, an RPG with a visual close to a Darksider and resolutely hardcore gameplay. Three years later, the studio offers us a new vision of Souls-Like with a software that is eyeing this time towards the futuristic post-apo, the aptly named The Surge. This year, it is the second opus of this license that comes to us with the desire to modernize its recipe by making it lighter, more flexible and more dynamic, as we pointed out during our preview. So in the end, is it mecha good or not?

At dawn on the 6th day

The software opens with the tirade of a somewhat pessimistic child, followed by a plane crash which leads us directly into a somewhat sketchy character creator, which notably allows you to choose the “lore” of your hero as well as his physical appearance. If the customization options have the merit of existing, they are not frankly numerous or even pretty to tell the truth, but in any case, with the frame that you will put on your face in the half hour which will follow this is not very serious. Your hero or heroine will soon look like nothing more than a scrap automaton.

When you wake up, you are amnesiac, lying on a table in the medical wing of a penitentiary in the grip of a major assault. This is where your trip to hell begins in the good old town of Jericho.

It is not good to live in the city and you will quickly understand it once you have set your nose outside. Jericho is surrounded by a huge wall supposed to stem a strange infection of nanite (a kind of swarm of nanotechnology), nicknamed here the “Defrag”. Between the walls, the majority of the inhabitants will want your skin without anyone knowing why, the opportunity to lay eyes on the bestiary mainly composed of humans decked out in a whole lot of armor.

The city depicted in The Surge 2 is in ruins and completely invaded by crazy people of all kinds: prisoners, religious fanatics, drug addicts or parasitized humans… Not really friendly beings. To counter this, a militia, the AID, was deployed to evacuate civilians and restore calm to the area, but in Jericho the police are not the very peaceful type and this government army will quickly attacking you on sight without warning and finally, a whole armada of deadly robotic machines are also hiding in the streets and gardens of the city. Yes, Jericho is a real cutthroat.

Alas, The Surge 2 never goes to the end of its ideas and despite the crazy possibility of presenting diverse and varied half-human half-machine creatures, Deck 13 prefers to clone its bestiary to its heart's content, as we already pointed out during our preview. It's not complicated, the first prisoners whose skulls are smashed in the prison must obviously be twin brothers just like the female enemies also apparently, and when you arrive in town, it's a festival. On 50 meters, you will simply encounter the same mixed-race human 4 times. A joke.

So, yes, we can excuse this “cloning” when we talk about mechanized adversaries (chain production etc…), but what about human beings? There must be 3 or 4 different models for each type of enemy (prisoners, fanatics, AID agents, etc.) and for a game like this, that's quite a task. Especially since the lifespan is generous, the round trips are numerous and you will die many times, thus forcing you to redo the same paths several times. In short, it's not famous and even if the pieces of equipment they wear are drawn a little randomly, nothing helps, we know that it's the same redhead that we hit behind that helmet.

The bosses meanwhile are doing a little better. As in most souls-like, these clashes are not of the same caliber, we come across what are called mid-bosses, which generally offer shorter but not necessarily easier brawls, and real bosses, those who collect life bars, multiple combat phases and are generally several meters high. In The Surge 2, some bosses will be beaten several times and most are sorely lacking in punch, whether they are mostly human mid-bosses devoid of charisma and whose confrontation will bend in two or three rushes, or the bosses more sturdy, but whose patterns can be counted on the fingers of one hand in addition to being seen from miles away. Fortunately there is good, at first the boss fights are more numerous than in the first opus and some clashes stand out.

Change to reign better

The Surge 2 therefore tries to do better than its big brother by multiplying the full-bodied confrontations and in the end, despite the repetitions mentioned above, it is successful. The game is difficult yes, it is a certainty and you will die many times. The enemies have the annoying habit of chaining us with quick blows or shoving their hammer into our face so violently that we end up with a quarter of life to crawl around trying to heal ourselves. But in the end, we expected no less.

The challenge is there and to overcome it nothing like xp. Here to increase in power, you have to use the local currency: spare parts. Recoverable mainly from your targets, these scrap pieces will be used to do everything: level up, improve your equipment and forge new ones, but also to haggle with the few NPCs you come across. You will therefore have to make a choice on your angle of evolution or else farm like a savage to have everything. We opted for the first solution by focusing our ramp-up on a few hand-picked pieces of equipment. In the end, the balancing did not seem to us to be faulty and the challenge was there.

How to Glue a Puzzle Together: http://t.co/JIH9vW932w via @YouTube

— Daniel Conner Sun Jul 07 15:46:54 +0000 2013

As in The Surge first of the name, you will increase the power of the core of your exoskeleton, which will allow you to graft more and more powerful equipment. At each level gained you can distribute points in your life, your stamina or your battery, a gauge which increases when you hit opponents and which allows the activation of bonuses or the use of injections to recover energy. life, even boosting its stats with various steroids. It will also be possible to use implants that provide various passive properties, such as defense and damage bonuses, or effects based on our remaining batteries.

Sekiro + For Honor = The Surge

Yes you read this inter-title correctly, The Surge 2 draws shamelessly from From Software and Ubisoft for its combat system. First of all, you should know that the roots of the gameplay remain the same. One locks enemies and their limbs in order to slice them so as to recover the pieces of equipment attached to them. Positioning is always of paramount importance, since it is not because you target the right leg that you will be able to reach it, and if you attack for example on the opposite flank, it is the left limbs that will take the damage. The foundations are therefore identical and you quickly (re)take your bearings.

Nevertheless, Deck 13 has improved its copy by adding a good big dose of dynamism and complexity. The number of weapon types has doubled, thereby providing new insights. To the weapons of fistfights, those with one or two hands and heavy weapons fixed to the arm or not are added, among others, the doubles, which can pass from a heavy weapon to a duo of light weapons in a fraction of a second , depending on the combos you make. This allows for example to send a powerful blow and to chain a fast devastating and ultra fast combo. In total, it's a dozen types of weapons that await you, each of them having its own combos and its way of being approached.

Overall, the fights are more fluid and dynamic and we can count on a significant dash, which will not fail to make you fall during duels near ledges.

But The Surge 2 hides a second way to fight, facilitated by an implant, combat with directional blocking. Like For Honor, and provided you equip yourself with the appropriate unlockable implant from the start of the adventure, you will have the possibility of seeing a quarter compass appear indicating to you the origin of the blow, or if that -this is simply unstoppable. From then on, you will have to block and then push your joystick in the direction from which the danger arrives with impeccable timing to parry the attack.

It is also here that The Surge 2 imprints on Sekiro since during a blockage, you can directly follow up with a critical attack whose effects can vary depending on the enemy. On the other hand, when you fight the bosses, you will have to parry several times before opening a breach in their defense and thus gaining a good big damage boost. However, this mechanism is a double-edged sword, because if it is poorly executed, the stamina flies away at high speed and your character can very quickly find itself in a bad position. So be careful.

Truly, The Surge 2's combat system is a hit and works beautifully. The nags will always be able to dash and dodge with a dash, while the others will use directional blocking to create openings. Only downside, we deplore a lot of bugs during the animations of execution which allow to slice the members. These are triggered when you want to cut the part of the body you are targeting. Then launches a different choreography depending on the type of weapon, the member targeted and the enemy. Alas, they are often the scene of bugs. We'll especially note those collisions that are downright monstrous and laughable, sometimes making the action “What the Fuck”. It therefore happens that our avatar crashes into the background or slips on it, but very (too in fact) often, it is the animation that starts completely in a vacuum at 1 meter from the targeted enemy who then dismembers himself in his corner.

A finish without the onions

Here we touch on the big problem of The Surge 2, its technique. If on PC the game is doing quite well, as during our preview, on PS4 it's another story. It's very simple, the textures are 10 years late.

So don't get me wrong, it's not that they're ugly enough to send us back to the PS3 era, no, they're really late in fact. Are we entering a new area? Are we coming out of a medical station? Are we running too fast while swiveling the camera? Well, the walls are drooling, the characters are all dressed in fuzzy clothes, and our armor has no detail for a good solid twenty seconds, sometimes even the textures never come up. This was the case for us in the middle and end of the adventure, with pieces of our equipment that will never have had the chance to reveal their details.

It's also a shame that the aliasing bites almost all the edges of walls or windows, and that some enemies allow themselves to suddenly appear a few meters from us, below or behind glass. We could also highlight pathfinding concerns, blocking your opponents in the background under the influence of an unstoppable foot march against a 20cm wall or even an AI sometimes blind, sometimes equipped with an excessive aggro zone. .

All these little things do not really start the gameplay, even the AI ​​problems finally, defects that one could blame on other titles of the genre like Sekiro or Dark Souls. In reality, they serve the overall experience simply because combined, they crush the work done on immersion.

Jericho is a sprawling city with a perfectly mastered level design, shortcuts and other hidden corners are legion and our urban exploration is done most naturally in the world. As we progress, we even unlock a few tools allowing us to unlock new passages and a big surprise awaits you in the last third of the game. Everything is there to make The Surge 2 a very, very good souls-like, but no. The abundance of bugs constantly reminds us that we are in front of a badly finished game and all the small insignificant things suddenly jump in our face.

The environmental narrative also takes the lead in the wing, in particular because of serious problems of coherence and staging. The city is under siege and in the throes of real massacre games in its streets, the police want you dead, this police who will not even hit you when you are in “secure” areas where there are some survivors, even if just before to cross the door, you have just decimated a complete unit. Or you'll come across a community of exhausted survivors while others enjoy the dancefloor at a trendy bar a few blocks away. Yes, we didn't really understand the concept, let alone later in the game, where people are dancing while their comrades are dead at their feet. So either we understood absolutely nothing about what was going on during the 25 hours of play we did, or we are faced with a real finishing problem, a mixture of bugs and “I don't care. -acute". No idea, the fact remains that for the immersion we will come back, and it's a shame for a game with a more than adequate lifespan whose side quests require a bit of concentration not to be failed and whose replayability is planned with the NG+.

In addition, the common thread feels a little warmed up even if it offers small surprises, especially on its secondary axes, and if it is not essential to have gone through the first opus, we still recommend it. just to be receptive to a few encounters and winks in The Surge 2.