Recent reviews by random_script

This is kind of 50/50.
I like the first game a lot, even though it is simpler and easier I think The Surge 1 is the best souls like game so far. So I had very high expectations for the sequel.
In The Surge 2 there are many things I dislike a lot:
- The story and the atmosphere is terrible.
- There is a lot of artificial difficulty.
- The game feels even more unfair than the first one. There were many times when I could not tell why did I die or that I died for some kind of op attack spam. The game pretty much forces some kind of playstile against certain enemies, because not taking damage becomes almost imposible.
- The bosses feel terrible the first time you encounter them, their attacks don't telegraph well, which is important because they are very directonial-parry centered. I had a hard time wondering how the hell take down the first boss.
- The world has too many shortcuts and areas that need loading (therefore respawning the enemies).

Kind of just ok. Nothing really wrong with it, but also nothing really amazing.
A bit on the not enough content and copy paste side. Also the bosses felt kind of missing something.

Not as good as part 2, but I think it is better than part 1.
Some of the serpent's stuff felt off. I killed 3 by pure luck, 2 by brute force and 2 by knowing their weaknesses.

At first I didn't quite like it, it felt weird and clunky and the art style is odd.
After a couple of hours you get the mindset for the rest of the game.
I love the skill tree, I guess they borrowed the idea from Final Fantasy and Path of Exile.
The combat is pretty simple but effective and the weapons/crafting is great.
The Dark Souls inspiration is clear and they got the right sense for it, doing their own thing,
I suck at platformers, but I managed to beat this game without much trouble. The hardest parts are not that hard if you stop a second to plan or think about it, which is good design.
The game has a ton of content that is easy to miss. You probably will need multiple characters to find out everything.

Hollow Knight is the most similar game to this that I have played. I like HK more, since it is a much more packed and longer game, but I truly hate that in HK you take damage if you get in physical contact with the enemies, which happens all the time. HK is also much more harder than SaS and has a ton o optional crazy hard content.
In short I like the characters, crafting, weapons, skill tree and secrets more in SaS but I like HK a bit more in everything else.
So my advice is to play both, best games of the genre for me.

The hard fights seem more fair than in episode 1.
I liked it more than episode 1, probably due to this was developed in 2 years instead of 1, which means a lot more of work.

There are a couple of quests that are a bit meh, but overall this has a good quality.
I kind of dislike the last fight, that is mostly a hide and seek endurance battle.

This is my favorite Souls-like so far, yet I still believe FromSoftware games are better in general and particularly in design quality. I have yet to try The Surge 2 and Nioh 2.

So the good:
- Awesome atmosphere and world building.
- Awesome labyrinth level design, the best I have found in that regard.
- The implant system it is great to fit your character to your play style.
- Some sets are awesome.

The bad:
- Even with all the DLCs there is not much content. It is enough for a couple of playthroughs, but kind of lacks.
- The combat can be kind of repetitive and trivial and cutting limbs gets old after some hours.
- The testing chamber can be quite boring and repetitive.
- A couple of areas have too much poison or enemies in groups.
- The game is pretty much unbalanced, so there are many play style options that are worthless.
- Very few bosses and enemy diversity.

The ugly:
- Most of the bosses are kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
- Many animation attacks are kind of broken: too fast, too wide, too strong.
- The lockon mechanism is terrible when you have multiple enemies and you want to focus on one specifically (which is very often in late game). This comes from using the same binding as the limb selection, which is fine, but the initial enemy selection is not viable to do in the short time you get when ambushed.

I picked this up because it was on sale. I did not have much expectations, but I am surprised about how fun this has been so far.
I don't really play platformers, but this one really is appealing to me. Very simple, very just, very lean.

Overall this is a good remake.
Half Life 1 is a great game, an amazing adventure and very immersive, but to be fair there were lots of times in the game where you didn't knew what the hell were you doing due to the graphics. Black Mesa solves that, most of the time.
I don't mind the changes, EXCEPT for the Xen chapters. I agree with most of the players that they are stretched, and so, their quality drops. The final bossfight (Nihilanth) is quite different from the original. I remember thinking that the original was a bit of a drag, but also cool with all the jumping around; anyway the new one is very fair, so I am ok with it.

For me the real problem of this game is the FPS drops it gets in some of the open areas, I guess there are optimization issues, but since the game is still playable is not a fatal flaw.

This is one of my fav games ever. I spent a lot of time when I was around 10 playing this and getting all the medals and all.

It is a shame that I can make this game work with Steam, neither on Windows or Linux. It works fine under Wine with the GOG version, but with this one I get a crash that I still don't know how to fix.