The Surge 2 is ugly. I don't necessarily mean that to imply that the art direction is bad or anything because it's about at the same level as the first game, but playing this on a base Xbox One console really highlights just how terrible modern games can look in certain conditions. Put simply, the combination of a low internal resolution and blurry textures gives The Surge 2's characters and environments an "empty polygon pinata" look. Other games suffer from this same issue, of course, but it's pronounced enough here that I finally found a way to describe it. Another thing I intensely dislike is the gameplay; I spent a decent chunk of yesterday glued to Lucah: Born of a Dream, one of the best implementations of Souls-like combat I've ever seen, and that's not a game that The Surge 2 compares favorably to. Lucah is filled with challenging combat encounters and a system that your muscle memory somehow learns before your eyes can catch up. The Surge 2, meanwhile, starts off with combat that's a floatier, less reliable take on the first game's mechanics. The entire control scheme has been changed for the worse and feels substantially less reliable.
Where Lucah looks impenetrable but ends up playing in a very intuitive way, The Surge 2 looks straightforward but screws with the first game's mechanics in an uncomfortable way.
All of the first game's problems—narrow corridors that make the camera an awkward problem, a story that takes an insane concept entirely too seriously (which is especially disappointing after the first game's A Walk in the Park DLC started to lean into humor), and mechanics that seem to exist solely to make certain play styles impractical—are present and arguably exacerbated. Example: The Surge 2's verticality and weird physics make it possible to walk toward a techno-magic hoverpad, get caught on some invisible piece of nothingness that redirects you ever so slightly, and fall off of a building and die instantly. Everything feels that clumsy and unnecessary.
Another thing I despise is that enemies reappear after area transitions. The original game's enemies would stay dead until you used a med-bay or died, making it possible to clear out large areas and explore without having to worry about getting attacked, but The Surge 2 takes a different approach. At 29:57 in the embedded video, you can see me run through a cleared area to a door that turns out to be an area transition that functions as a shortcut back to the starting area. I turned around since it wasn't a new area like I thought, only for every enemy in the world to respawn as soon as I went back through the area transition. The problem is that The Surge 2 thinks that its central gimmick has more value than it does; targeting and removing individual body parts is more of a "huh, okay" feature than a selling point, and it can't make up for the bad decisions.
I downloaded this because sniping at Games Pass games that I neglected to cover when they first came out is my hobby, and I only have that subscription for another week, but I think I'm going to go back and play some more Lucah instead. This might be worse than the 7/10s it got.
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