The Surge 2

The Surge 2 is a third-person action RPG from Deck13, published by Focus, and it launched on 24 September 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with an Amazon Luna release in October 2020. It is the sequel to The Surge, and it puts you in a new character you design yourself. The campaign is single-player only: no co-op, no invasions. What passes for online is asynchronous — graffiti other players can read, revenge enemies flagged from other people's fights, and hidden banners. This review covers the base game, with the expansions and New Game Plus called out where they change how a run ends.

Jericho City is the best thing Deck13 has built

Your plane goes down on the way in. You wake weeks later in a detention facility inside Jericho City, where soldiers are enforcing martial law, the robots have gone rogue, and a nanostorm is spreading across the skyline. The premise is thin on purpose: it exists to get you walking.

It works because the city is a knot rather than a map. Rubble shifts, doors get fixed, lifts and zipwires tie one district to another, and a route you ignored an hour ago quietly becomes the shortcut you needed. Districts still sit behind loading screens, and the place is not open world — you are being funnelled, just very cleverly. Fast travel turns up late and arrives as a pipe network you unlock one segment at a time, which is the right call: by the time you can skip the walk, you already know why you would want to.

The limb is the loot

Armoured enemies carry the parts you need. You lock onto a head, torso, arm or leg, then damage it enough to sever it with a finishing move. Armour cuts yield schematics and crafting components; take those to a medbay to make the piece. Severing a weapon arm can claim the weapon itself.

Which limb you can reach depends on how you swing. Horizontal attacks find one set of targets, vertical attacks another, so choosing your loot means choosing your combos before you know how the fight will go. Unarmoured limbs take more damage but do not yield an armour schematic, which turns a quick kill into a decision you make with your wallet. Target the arm to get the weapon, the leg to finish the set, the torso because it is armoured and you actually need the alloy. Then the enemy calls two friends.

It is the best risk-and-reward loop in the genre's mid-tier, and it is the reason to play this one over its neighbours. Nothing else in Jericho City asks you a question as good.

Parrying got a direction

The first Surge had one all-purpose parry. The sequel replaces it with a directional block: you have to match the side the attack is coming from, on timing. Miss the direction and you eat the hit. There is an implant that flashes arrows telling you where the blow is coming from, and it earns its slot for the whole game.

This is the change that makes The Surge 2 feel like its own game rather than a longer sequel. Parrying sits at the middle of combat instead of off to one side, and a counter off a clean parry is worth more than a full combo you had to work for. The cost is a rhythm you have to learn: stamina is not generous, so panic-blocking and mashing both leave you standing there with nothing left to spend, which is usually the moment the game kills you.

Scrap, medbays and batteries

Tech scrap is both experience and money. You lose everything unbanked when you die and have to walk back to the pile, and the pile is on a timer that killing enemies extends. It also heals you while you stand near it, which makes it a genuine tactical object in the middle of a boss fight rather than a chore on the floor.

Medbays are the bonfires: activate one, get your health back, respawn most of the district, then bank scrap, raise your core power, or craft and upgrade from the parts you tore off people. Healing rewards aggression. There is no fixed stack of flasks. Battery charges are earned by attacking, and you spend them on health injectables, buffs and the finishing moves that cut limbs off. Landing attacks replenishes the resource that supports your healing. The game wants you forward, but it still punishes careless swings.

Implants, power and loadouts

Your exo-rig is a budget. Armour and implants draw on the same pool, so every piece you bolt on is a piece you cannot wear somewhere else, and the slots themselves open up as you put scrap into core power. Injectables burn battery for a burst of healing or damage. Boosters just sit there giving you passive value. The result is a build you are constantly re-cutting rather than one you solve once.

Weapons run across nine melee families, from quick one-handed blades and punching gloves to hammers and slow two-handed wrecking tools, and every one of them has vertical and horizontal attacks that matter for looting. The double-duty weapons are the ones worth mentioning: they split into a fast pair, or lock together into one heavy weapon, and switching between those two modes mid-fight is more useful than it has any right to be. Nothing has a skill requirement, so a weapon you take off a corpse is usable immediately. Loadout slots let you save a set and swap it instead of rebuilding your character in a menu every time the game changes what it is asking of you.

The drone, and the odd-sock online layer

An early boss hands you a combat drone, and it stays useful in ways that are easy to overlook. Modules let it distract an enemy, snipe something across a gap, or fly you out of trouble and back to safety while dropping every scrap you were carrying. Drone ammunition is an item you loot or buy, so the drone is a resource, not a companion who solves fights for you.

The online layer adds a useful sense of other people passing through. The same drone sprays graffiti that other players can read, so you get warnings about ambushes and hints about loot without ever being in a lobby with anyone. Revenge enemies turn up carrying the grudges of other people's runs. Banners you hide pay out if nobody finds them. None of it is co-op, and none of it is ever required, which is exactly the right weight for it.

Where the seams show

The story is the weak leg. Jericho City is full of side characters with good jokes and almost no arc, and the mystery you are chasing resolves long after you have worked it out. The best writing is in the small stuff: a vending machine with opinions, an audiolog that turns out to be a scam, dialogue options that let you be rude to a boss on the radio.

Combat has its own soft spots. Tight corridors and mid-room debris get between you and the fight, and the lock-on does not always save the camera when a big enemy fills the screen. The difficulty curve is lumpy rather than smooth: the early districts and the later ones can both flatten you, while a build stacked around battery efficiency and health injectables can turn the last third into a parade. Bosses are the other recurring complaint. Some are excellent, and several later ones read as higher-level versions of a shape you already solved. Some boss fights reward a particular cut or optional condition with a special weapon, giving you another reason to learn the encounter.

A fair amount of the technical trouble people remember belongs to launch week. Stuttering, screen tearing in the busiest areas and texture pop-in were all reported at release, and the first patch chased stutter and crashes.

What the expansions add, and what they are not

Kraken is the real expansion, released in January 2020. It adds a story chapter aboard the VBS Krakow, a decommissioned aircraft carrier turned retreat for the rich, with retro-styled suburbs, robot pirates, deranged security systems and a new boss, plus weapons, implants and armour to find. Everything else in the DLC list is gear: Future Shock and JCPD arrived as free weapon and gear packs, the URBN set was a pre-order extra, and the Public Enemy and Jericho's Legacy packs add weapons and armour sets. The Premium Edition bundles the base game with all of it. None of it changes whether the base campaign is worth your time.

New Game Plus is not DLC and never was. It is part of the base game: you carry your gear into a second run with reworked enemy placement and a little more of the story, and it is the mode the deeper builds are built for. Treat Kraken as a return trip and New Game Plus as the second lap, because they are answering different questions.

The pulse

Combat and progression earned the strongest reception: the limb system, the directional parry and the crafting loop were called the strongest parts of the game, and the new weapon variety and loadouts were singled out as quality-of-life wins over the original.

The complaints were just as consistent. Characters and plot drew the same shrug almost everywhere, the camera and lock-on took hits in tight spaces, and several reviewers found the difficulty dropping away once a build came online. Reviews put a first run somewhere around twenty hours, which is short enough that the second lap is a real option rather than a commitment.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want the grind to have a decision in it. Cutting a specific limb off a specific enemy to finish a specific armour set is a better reason to fight than another health bar, and the directional parry gives the moment-to-moment combat an identity that most soulslikes in this bracket do not have.

Skip it if you need the story to carry you. The world is a great place to be trapped in and a poor one to care about, and the camera can pick a fight with you in tight corridors. The Surge 2 is a scrappy, specific game with one great idea and the discipline to build a whole combat system around it. We would take that over a competent game with none.