It's not that The Surge 2 is buggy or broken - all 20+ hours of my initial playthrough and the several hours I've spent in New Game+ ran smoothly and (almost) without issue. Its lush wooded hills and rocky canyons are a welcome break from the fairly repetitive city streets and rooftops, even if it caused some of the more egregious technical issues during my playthrough on PlayStation 4 Pro. The main exception to this rule, apart from the more claustrophobic sewers and tunnels underneath the city, is Gideon's Rock, a nature preserve designed to… well, preserve nature - but, like… the last of it. There are some mid-game situations that bring about some significant alterations to each area, but that doesn't save them from still feeling relatively samey. Jericho's different areas, meanwhile, feel mostly divided by color and lighting rather than the actual design of each area – the port is rusted and wet, the hospital is spooky and dark, and everything has toppled piles of gray concrete everywhere.
The nature preserve is a welcome break from repetitive city streets and rooftops. The R&D area, for instance, looked and felt completely different from the manufacturing plant. By contrast, one of the things I really appreciated about the original was that, while the different areas of the CREO complex all had some unifying elements (corporate signage and propaganda, or the uniform design of the Science Fiction Maintenance Tunnel), the thematic design of each zone was unique. Its five main areas (technically there are nine to explore, but you'll only really spend a meaningful amount of time in five) all have a different look and feel - the downtown shopping district, the port, the hospital/business district, etc - but aside from one or two they all feel like variations on the same "urban wasteland" template. The Surge 2 takes place in the ruins of Jericho City (complete with its own big wall, definitely no biblical allegories here), the closest metropolis to the ill-fated CREO facility, after a mysterious plane crash that unleashed a torrent of sentient machines called Nanites and left the city a cordoned-off no man’s land.
However, there are some environmental design and storytelling decisions that eliminate some of the original’s charm and cause the story to trip over its own feet. On paper, The Surge 2 does exactly what it should in order to achieve the goals of a sequel: it’s retained a lot of what worked in the first game, and throws in a few solid system updates and quality-of-life improvements aimed at making a better version of the original. The Surge 2 fits snugly into the latter category: this return to the sci-fi Souls-like action game realm hacks and slashes just as hard – harder, in some cases – but falls just short of recapturing the same dismembering joy. On the flip-side, there are plenty of instances where, despite a few new good ideas and generally high quality, the sequel doesn’t create quite as much of an impression. The best of them not only manage to recapture what people enjoyed about the original, but also find ways to enhance them while effectively introducing new ideas.
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