I've never been a Dark Souls fanatic, but I appreciate the vibrant new mini-genre of Souls-likes it's helped inspire. The Surge is one of those, and from what I saw at E3 2018, The Surge 2 looks like it will be a big improvement with some new ideas of its own.
For the last month, I've been livestreaming my playthrough of The Surge on Kotaku's Twitch channel, defeating one boss a week. Last night, I completed the game. While it was exciting at first, I can now officially confirm that The Surge is not very good.
The Surge is a futuristic action game in the vein of Dark Souls that pits players against a host of robots and power-suit-wearing goons. It's fun to bash on zombies, but even better to cut their limbs off to steal their loot.
Like slicing and kicking the shit out of people? Then you'll enjoy the range of titles on offer this week. Injustice 2 lets you (virtually) put the foot into Superman or Batman's junk. Lo Wang returns to slice and dice enemies in Shadow Warrior 2, there's an arena fighter between black and white samurai, PlayStation VR gets one of its biggest releases yet, and there's an adventure involving some bloke called Mr. Pumpkin.
This year's PC Gaming Show was neatly wedged between the Ubisoft and Microsoft conferences. But its presence was overlooked by many outlets and questions still remained as to whether it could shrug off the awkwardness of its inaugural year.
Partly in response, the show's organisers responded with a brisk 100 minutes of trailers, interviews and gameplay footage.
