Is The Surge brutally hard?

[Linus Hyper]

I've been hearing it borrows from the Souls games and Lords of the Fallen.

[BigBoss]

if you've never played a souls game before... yea it's kinda hard. you can die in like 1-3 hits from basic enemies consistently throughout the game, no matter how much armor you stack...
if you've played souls game/s before... it's very easy at the start but get pretty tough later on when you can't just rush everything to death anymore.

it's not "brutally hard" tho. it's hard, but not "unfair-hard".

[The two ton terror of Tel-Aviv]

it just demands that you think before you act

[Skeloton]

In my experience, the surge is harder. But it doesnt feel like souls type of diffculty. It can feel very artifcial in places. There are two very noticable spikes in difficulty, in the second one theres one enemy i just cannot fathom why they are the way they are.

[The two ton terror of Tel-Aviv]

Originally posted by Skeloton:

In my experience, the surge is harder. But it doesnt feel like souls type of diffculty. It can feel very artifcial in places. There are two very noticable spikes in difficulty, in the second one theres one enemy i just cannot fathom why they are the way they are.

that's just like, your opinion man

[MGMons]

Originally posted by Skeloton:

In my experience, the surge is harder. But it doesnt feel like souls type of diffculty. It can feel very artifcial in places. There are two very noticable spikes in difficulty, in the second one theres one enemy i just cannot fathom why they are the way they are.

Hey, in which area is this enemy you're talking about?

[BigBoss]

which enemy? i'm curious :o

[Max]

its like a hardmode for darksouls

[Linus Hyper]

Alright then, I haven't played any of the Souls games but I have played Lords of the Fallen and Bloodborne. Both was really difficult for me but I liked that challenge. I might pick up The Surge on sale then.

[The two ton terror of Tel-Aviv]

Originally posted by Phobos⛧Anomaly:

Alright then, I haven't played any of the Souls games but I have played Lords of the Fallen and Bloodborne. Both was really difficult for me but I liked that challenge. I might pick up The Surge on sale then.

If you have the money, buy at full price. The game/devs is worth supporting. It's a smaller studio and this game is a triumph for the budget they had, i'm really hoping this sells and gets the recognition it deserves.

[Linus Hyper]

Oh I'm sure they are. But I'm low on cash for a while.

[Xbob42]

Originally posted by Skeloton:

In my experience, the surge is harder. But it doesnt feel like souls type of diffculty. It can feel very artifcial in places. There are two very noticable spikes in difficulty, in the second one theres one enemy i just cannot fathom why they are the way they are.

Your post is quite vague. "Artificial," artificial how? All difficulty is artificial. You've got to provide details.

In my experience, it's about the same type of difficulty as the Souls games, but you're more fragile (while also more agile) than your typical Souls character. You've got some great utility in the form of poke attacks (dodge forward + attack, then dodge back) so you can get some easy damage in, but you've also got combos, and bigger weapons with high impact can knock even heavy enemies out of animations, so if you learn how their attacks work, you can learn just when to stick a big combo in their face without them being able to retaliate.

As always, you'll be in trouble if you pull a few too many enemies at once, but I've never felt any one encounter was designed poorly, or that it was too hard. I'm not all the way through the game, so there's that, but I definitely don't feel any difficulty spikes that are unmanageable so far.

[Malidictus]

Personally, the difficulty feels "artificial" in the sense that very simple mistakes can get you killed from full health. The whole point of the "Dark Souls Style" games is that they're difficult but fair, where losing makes you feel like it was your fault. I find it hard to feel that in this game. It often feels like I've done everything I could right, but slightly mistimed a dodge, got stun-locked and killed from full health with 6 healing items left. That right there feels like the game ♥♥♥♥♥♥ me, not to put too fine a point on it.

[BigBoss]

that's always been the case with dark souls too tho... at least in my playthroughs. light or no armor means 1 mistake and you're gone. feels exactly the same in this game. maybe in dark souls you can turtle behind a shield and or use extremely heavy armor to mitigate that... but that ain't my style so it's pretty much the same here. in my case at least.

[Xbob42]

I dunno, early in Souls games, when you're not super experienced, you die really quickly as well. It probably feels "artificial" in the sense that since you have an abundance of experience, you expect to be able to dominate to a certain extent. Like mistiming a dodge... maybe block and counterattack instead? It's a safer option if an enemy deals that much damage.

Also I don't think anything in the game has killed me in one hit, usually 2-3, which feels fine to me. You can buff your health with multiple implants and gear up to high defense, which should get you to 4-6 hits, but really, don't mistime your dodge, y'know? You yourself admit that you made a mistake.

The game is probably more brutal than Dark Souls because people have almost a decade of Souls experience at this point, so making it the same level of difficulty would be easy.

It's not like enemies spawn out of nowhere, and there's very few traps of any sort. You can plan and prepare for each fight.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by BigBoss:

that's always been the case with dark souls too tho... at least in my playthroughs. light or no armor means 1 mistake and you're gone. feels exactly the same in this game. maybe in dark souls you can turtle behind a shield and or use extremely heavy armor to mitigate that... but that ain't my style so it's pretty much the same here. in my case at least.

That's exactly what I did in Lords of the Fallen. I pushed my Strength up as high as it would go, put on the heaviest armour I could find, grabbed the largest shield I had access to and equipped that anti-stagger medallion. Towards the end of the game, I was able to block almost any attack and usually blow through most of the enemies' lighter attacks just tanking their damage to health. The other day, I actually logged back in to show the game off to a friend really quickly and managed to kill two of the big shield dudes pretty easily despite not even remembering the controls for the most part.

There's no such option here. I'm wearing the heaviest armour I have access to and that barely seems to matter. I still get stun-locked and killed in two hits by almost everyone.

Originally posted by Xbob42:

Also I don't think anything in the game has killed me in one hit, usually 2-3, which feels fine to me. You can buff your health with multiple implants and gear up to high defense, which should get you to 4-6 hits, but really, don't mistime your dodge, y'know? You yourself admit that you made a mistake.

Yeah, ONE mistake, and a very easy one to make, too. That's what makes it feel artificail. Maybe I got too used to Lords of the Fallen, but even there I don't remember anything short of a boss killing me that quickly, or staggering me that much. I'm supposed to have "high" stability but that hardly seems to matter.