The Surge puts you in a wheelchair, then welds an exoskeleton onto your body while you are awake. That is the pitch Deck13 Interactive built its 2017 action role-playing game around, and it remains the sharpest thing about it. The Surge launched May 16, 2017 on PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One. An Amazon Luna version followed on October 20, 2020. It carries a 7.4/10 critic aggregate across 12 outlets, and that number holds up.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Warren Rides The Bullet Train To CREO
You play Warren, a new hire riding a bullet train to the headquarters of CREO, one of the largest tech conglomerates left standing. Earth is near the end of its life. Social programs are saturated by an aging population, environmental diseases are spreading, and drones and working robots have created mass unemployment. Humans who want to keep up get augmentations and powered rigs. Warren uses a wheelchair. He picks a starting robotic rig, then goes under for surgical implantation of an advanced CREO exoskeleton.
The automated system fails to sedate him. It grafts each component while he is conscious and in pain. He passes out during neurosurgery. He wakes to a ruined facility, drones attacking personnel, and fellow workers prey to a deranged bloodthirst. An executive known only as “Sally” guides him through the complex toward the Executive Forum to find out what happened.
That opening is the game’s best argument for itself. The Surge does not open on a chosen one. It opens on a man in a wheelchair who took a job and got carved into a weapon by a machine that did not bother to put him under.
Cutting Limbs Off Robots In Bullet Time
Combat is the core. The Surge is designed in the challenging role-playing style of the Dark Souls series. You target specific body parts of enemies and use finishing moves that often end in dismemberment, shown in bullet time. The loot system is tied directly to that: you loot what you dismember. Cut off the arm holding the weapon you want, and you can take it.
That single idea does more work than any other system in the game. It forces a decision every fight. Kill the enemy fast and clean, or fight longer and risk more to walk away with a specific piece of gear. It is a real risk-reward loop, and it is the reason The Surge has a combat identity of its own.
The exoskeleton can be customized through modular upgrades. You balance core power against implants and suit upgrades, and the combinations run into dozens of makeshift weapons salvaged from the industrial complex. You can tune your gear to a playstyle and to the challenge ahead. Deck13 described the game as inspired by Rise of the Robots and the Dark Souls series, and both debts are visible in the same frame.
Project reSOLVE And The Founder Jonah Guttenberg
The setting does real work here. CREO’s headline project is Project reSOLVE, founder Jonah Guttenberg’s plan to disperse a chemical formula by rocket to reseed Earth’s damaged atmosphere and boost plant growth worldwide. It is a grandiose fix for a dying planet, run by a company that also builds household items and advanced exoskeletons.
According to the developers, the game paints a grim portrait of the future where the evolution of technology in relation to society and the environment has led to a decadent era for humanity. That is their description, and the game earns it.
The Surge is a sci-fi spin on Dark Souls, from the Lords of the Fallen team.
Metroidvanian Levels Behind Over-Charged Doors
The CREO facility is the second half of the design. The levels are Metroidvanian, and they open up as your core power increases. Doors that were too strong for your suit to damage become passable once you over-charge them, which opens new pathways back through ground you already covered.
That structure keeps The Surge from being a straight corridor of boss fights. If you want the best equipment and weapons, you have to search every area for secrets and hidden items. The facility is vast, and the game rewards the search.
What The Surge Borrows From Lords Of The Fallen
The Surge is considered a spiritual successor to Deck13’s earlier action role-playing game Lords of the Fallen, and it shares many gameplay features with that game. The comparison is fair. The targeting system gives every enemy a body plan worth reading, and the dismemberment mechanic gives every fight a material outcome.
Here is how the two halves of the game stack up against each other:
| Element | The Surge’s approach | The article’s summary |
|---|---|---|
| Combat | Target specific limbs, finish in bullet time, loot what you cut | Designed in the challenging RPG style of Dark Souls |
| Loot | Gear comes off the enemy you dismembered | You loot what you dismember |
| Leveling | Core power balanced against implants and suit upgrades | Modular upgrades, dozens of makeshift weapons |
| Levels | Metroidvanian, gated by core power and over-charged doors | Search every area for secrets and hidden items |
| Setting | Dystopian CREO complex, Project reSOLVE, mass unemployment | A grim portrait of a decadent era for humanity |
The table is the review in miniature. The Surge is a game of interlocking systems that all point the same direction, and the cost of that focus is that nothing else gets much room.
Sally And A World That Outruns The Game
The Surge’s story is told through audiologs and NPCs. You meet different characters as you go, and Sally guides Warren up the complex. The plot is not the reason to play. The world is. A future where drones and robots made human labor worthless, and the answer was to bolt machinery onto your own body to keep pace with a more efficient equivalent, is a premise with teeth.
The problem is that the game rarely stops to let that premise land. The strongest material is environmental. The CREO facility tells you what happened to the people who worked there better than any character does. Warren’s own situation, a wheelchair user who went in for implantation and came out of a surgery the automated system failed to sedate, is the most interesting thing in the game, and it is largely front-loaded. Once you are in the suit, the game treats you as a suit.
That is not a failure of ambition. It is a failure of follow-through. Deck13 built a world worth exploring and then handed you a reason to sprint through it toward the next limb.
The Verdict On The Surge
The Surge is a good game with a great idea and a clear ceiling. The dismemberment loot loop is genuinely novel, and it is executed well enough that it carries the whole experience. The Metroidvanian structure gives the CREO facility a shape, and the core power gating makes exploration feel earned rather than gated for its own sake. The combat is tight and visceral, the bosses are huge, and the build variety is real.
What holds it back is the same thing that holds back most spiritual successors. It knows its lineage too well. The Dark Souls skeleton is visible in every system, and in this paper’s reading The Surge only occasionally pushes past imitation into something with its own pulse. When it does, it is in the limb targeting and the loot, and those moments are worth the price of admission.
The 7.4/10 aggregate is the right call. The Surge is not a game that changes the genre. It is a game that finds one excellent mechanic, builds a competent game around it, and leaves a world on the table that it never quite figures out how to use. The foundation is the thing worth judging it on.
If you want a challenging action RPG with a hook you have not seen before, The Surge delivers. If you want the world it promises in its opening hour, you will have to settle for the one it actually built.
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