The Surge Preview

The Surge is an action RPG, heavily focused on melee combat, set in a dystopian near future version of earth. At that time the world has a lot of environmental and ecological problems. Finding a job isn't too easy either, but our hero did find one at a company that tries to solve some of the environmental problems. At his first day at work he gets an exoskeleton. And as it is fitted to his body, something goes wrong, he blacks out and when he wakes up he finds himself at a no longer used, broken part of the company and he has to find out what has happened.

In the area you wake up, there is an operations center that you can use throughout the game. It is a hub where you can go for crafting, healing, leveling up your character and more, but for now we started with some action.

You fight using whatever is equipped on your exoskeleton at that moment and at the start this is not too complicated. You duck, role, get up and hit your opponent, which is pretty much like you do in any action game RPG. The game also features a backstab ability. If you can get at the back of your opponent you can use that ability. On top of that The Surge has a target system where you target parts of your opponent. Like an arm, a leg, the chest or even the head. When you defeat your opponent the targeted body part can be harvested, which can be used at a later stage to upgrade your own gear when you get back to your operations center. The demo also showed a boss fight. Most of the time there is more than one way to kill bosses, but you will need to find out what the best way of dealing with them is. The demo showed several other fights, one harder than the other. If you want to see a bit more of the fight, you can check out below E3 trailer.

Throughout the game you'll find overcharge stations that you can use to unlock doors with your core power. They all have a certain level. Higher levels require more core power to unlock them. If you can't unlock them now, you will have to get back to them at a later stage.

In the operations center there are several things you can do. There is a med bay, which is used to level up your core power and change the type of implants that you use. The implants is their version of having something similar to attributes and a skill tree.  There are implants for your health, your stamina or your energy, but there are also other implants, like an implant that allows you to see the health bar of your enemies. Beside that there are also injectables, which are a way to increase your health in the field.

At the crafting station items can be crafted from the parts you have harvested. For this to work you will need to have found the appropriate blue prints for these items as well. Once crafted you can equip these new items and create more powerful weapons or a better protection. It is also possible to craft a set of items that belong to each other. This will give you an extra bonus.

On my question if they focus on fighting only, they responded that combat is a core component of the game. You will also find NPCs throughout the company that you can talk to and maybe help out, but the combat is a core component.

As RPG elements in the game they list, the implant system, crafting and the core power, which is a resource system that can be leveled up, but is also needed for your implants and gear. If you take a lot of implants you cannot take very powerful gear with you for example.

Enemies will respawn when you are using the med bay or the crafting station, or when you die. The bosses themselves will not respawn. This allows you to grind for more items, but can also be a turn off for some of us.

With The Surge they are trying to create a game that will take you about 15 hours to complete if you rush through it, but double of that when you try to be a completionist and it is coming out on PC, PS4 and Xbox One in 2017