Before I even begin, I already know the first complaint that will be made about The Surge. "It's just Dark Souls, but in the future." And while that's right, it's also wrong. It's right in the sense that Dark Souls is also a hack and slash RPG with an emphasis on patience and difficulty, but Dark Souls, nor Demons Souls, were the original pioneers of that subgenre of video games. They merely popularized it. The cherry on this bad comparison sundae is that The Surge having an original story and setting already sets it leagues above a generic medieval dungeon crawler with its only gimmick being that it's difficult.

As Warren, you arrive at CREO, a robotics company desperately trying to reverse the effects of climate change, for your first day on the job. You quickly learn that your character, Warren, is paraplegic. Now how are you supposed to play an action RPG as a guy in a wheelchair? Well, luckily for the player, the position Warren has signed up for at CREO needs him to undergo a painful operation that will give him the ability to walk again as well as giving him near superhuman strength. The catch is that, in doing so, he must agree to have a metal exoskeleton surgically bound to his body.

"Show, don't tell" seems to be the motto for The Surge's story. Similar to many games that follow this narrative style, you enter CREO's facility after it has already gone through hell, and your main goal is to survive the mad house and get out. Just the environment alone does a great job of visually telling you of what happened. It also doesn't hurt that there are occasional audio logs and survivors scattered around to help put the pieces together. While told in a way that has been proven to be great time and time again, the story itself isn't anything special and merely serves as a backdrop for the vastly superior gameplay.

While nothing entirely special at first glance, the visuals of The Surge are quite impressive for a middle market game. From the highly detailed combination of the flesh and metal textures on Warren's newly modified body, to the sprawling, seemingly lived in, facility of the CREO complex, The Surge is a testament to the fact that you don't hundreds of millions of dollars to make a pretty game.

At this point, we're all familiar with combining light and heavy attacks as well as occasionally blocking and dodging to overcome hack and slash gameplay challenges. So what does The Surge bring to the table? Instead of needlessly adding arbitrary gameplay gimmicks or complicating systems that were fine the way they were before, The Surge chooses to refine already tried and true gameplay as well as putting a twist on some to make it its own.

Normally this is the part where I would say something along the lines of, "if you're familiar with Deck13's previous hack and slash outing, Lords of the Fallen, you'll be right at home with The Surge," but that would actually be wrong. If you did, by chance, play the criminally underrated Lords of the Fallen, then you would remember just how slow and deliberate it felt. The Surge is not at all like that. While it's still just as, if not more, deliberate as its predecessor, it's also much, much faster. Think of the nature evolution from Dark Souls to Bloodborne in terms of speed, and that's one of the only Dark Souls comparison that can be made here.

It's the little things that have a place in my heart. Something as simple as targeting seems like something that doesn't need to be improved on or tampered with in anyway, right? Well The Surge does just that and now it's how I want targeting to be in every game I play from now on. There's many things you have to pay attention to in The Surge, and enemy's armor is one of them. The Surge allows you to target individual body parts in real time and make decisions on the fly of where your attacks should land to inflict the most damage.

"Cutting" was, by far, my favorite feature in The Surge's. To cut, you must first build up your energy level by successfully chaining together light and heavy attacks to perform an instant kill. The benefits of cutting also go beyond just an instant kill. Say there's an enemy with a weapon you want. Simply target the body part that the enemy is holding the weapon in and cut it off. The successful cut will result in the enemy dropping said weapon and allow you to pick it up and use it. This also works for armor, so mutilating your enemies is greatly rewarded.

Just having light and heavy attacks is so 2011. Why not have vertical and horizontal attacks as well being able to combine those with light and heavy variants? With the addition of cutting individual body parts, having the ability to choose between vertical and horizontal attacks was definitely a needed option, and we got it. You wouldn't want to swing downwards when attacking someone's legs, you'd want to swing from the side.

Killing enemies rewards you with experience points. Take those experience points back to the designated safe area to level up, but if you die before you make it back to the safe area, you drop your experience points and have to pick them back up, and returning to these safe areas respawns all the enemies. Sound familiar? Well it should be to anyone that's played this kind of game in the last 5 or 6 years. There's nothing inherently wrong with this formula because many developers in the past have proven it to be effective. The problem The Surge has with it though is that it spreads these safe areas out thinner than Assassin's Creed's premise. There's only one or two safe areas, or "MedBays," per level, and these levels are huge. So you're either going to have to trek all the way back to the only MedBay in the level or pray to God that you can make it all the way through to the next level. Having more than one MedBay wouldn't have hurt the difficulty, Deck13.

Starting on the outskirts of CREO's facility, Warren must delve into the heart of a robotics lab in order to escape. As far as level design goes, The Surge offers enough to serve its intended purpose, but still nothing to write home about. The levels go far beyond the samey grey corridors and interiors that you would initially expect from a fictional facility like this, and they even feel lived in, as if they were designed with an actual purpose other than mindlessly murdering enemies scattered around, but nothing ever really stood out to me; or gave me that "wow" moment.

I also couldn't help but feel somewhat let down with the sound department. Now don't get me wrong, whether it's a chainsaw tearing through flesh and metal or bludgeoning unsuspecting crazy people to death, The Surge elevates the sound of death to an art form, but the music is seriously lacking. You would think that a cyberpunk action game would be a great excuse for the developers to throw in some fast, hard hitting synthwave, but with the exception of some occasional ambient tracks and a single Stumfol track, your ears will be treated to musical stylings of nothing ft. nada.

While not exactly the greatest game Focus Home Interactive have ever published, The Surge is an incredible experience and worthy of standing among the greats such as Dark Souls and Bloodborne. The soundtrack and level design leave much to be desired, but I'd be lying if I said that wasn't all made up by the beautifully refined gameplay. The Surge is a win for Deck13, Focus Home Interactive, and anyone fortunate enough to play through this game of the year contender.

Now where did this undying love begin? Well one day, whilst strolling through the Xbox Live marketplace, I stumbled upon an interesting little title that caught my eye; Mars: War Logs. The description and screenshots made it appear as a Mass Effect-esque space adventure. This was back in 2015, so I was still emotionally scarred from the utter disappointment of Mass Effect 3, and had yet to experience the human rights violating atrocity known as Mass Effect: Andromeda. I needed a worthy successor to Mass Effect, so after glancing over some reviews, I took a gamble on Mars: War Logs, and boy, did I get it.

Mars: War Logs opens on, you guessed it, Mars, in a POW camp where we are introduced to our first companion, Innocence, through a heavily implied attempted gay rape scene. If there's a better way than that to start a game, then I haven't seen it. Luckily the protagonist, Roy, intervenes just in time to prevent that from happening. What follows is a slow, yet deliberate prison break sequence reminiscent of The Great Escape that sets the tone and narrative for the rest of the game.

While some might be initially put off by the overall depressing tone of Mars: War Logs, I think it's fantastic because it illustrates a grittier depiction of war and death in a cyberpunk future. Most games with similar themes, such as Mass Effect and the latest entries in the Call of Duty series, show a much more "Hollywood-ized" version of those themes complete with huge budgets and explosion filled set pieces. Whereas Mars: War Logs drags you down into the thick of it. If that's the kind of future we have to look forward to, I'd look at Mars: War Logs to get a more accurate picture of what to expect; technomancy excluded.

"Technomancy?" What? Yes, in a way, similar to Biotics in the Mass Effect series, Mars: War Logs features "Technomancy." However, unlike Biotics, technomancy is limited to the ability to wield and control the power of electricity. Characters trained from a young age to use 'pre-Turmoil' artifacts enabling them to wield the electricity produced by the human body are called "Technomancers." Normally this would be a spoiler, but Mars: War Logs spoils itself with a locked skill tree that says "technomancy" when selected; Roy is a technomancer. The introduction of this plot point also becomes a gameplay change that was executed perfectly. Up until this point, I'd been playing for about 4 hours, so the fights had been becoming rather stale, and I can't help but feel this was intentional to make your newly acquired technomancy powers feel all the more powerful to freshen up the gameplay.

Anything beyond that actually would be a spoiler. So let's recap the story thus far: you're on Mars, it's a gritty cyberpunk future, you play as a guy named Roy, and Roy is a Technomancer. Got it? Alright, let's move on.

Mars: War Logs is not, I repeat: NOT, a shooter. Not a first person shooter. Not a third person shooter. Not a Bulgarian miak shooter. NOT a shooter. Surprising, right? Well the reason I bring this up is because, according to many reviews from both critics and users that I've come across, many people went into Mars: War logs expecting a third person shooter similar to Mass Effect. I don't know if it's because shooters were the only games being developed at the time or the fact that Mass Effect really is the only game Mars: War Logs can be compared to, but Mars: War Logs is a third person action adventure, not a shooter. However there are gun in gameplay, but they are used in a similar way to the guns in Bloodborne. Yet you wouldn't categorize Bloodborne as a third person shooter, right?

Perhaps it was just me, but I was nearly overwhelmed when first experiencing the combat Mars: War Logs had to offer. That was until I realized how simple, yet ingenious it actually was. You have basic melee combat mechanics such as attack, block, and dodge, but that won't be enough to get your through most enemy encounters. That's because enemies are actually somewhat competent and won't hesitate to murder you repeatedly if you try to spam your attacks. Since the enemies are as tough as nails, you must remain vigilant in every fight. Like I said, you have your attack, your block, and your dodge, but you must also utilize your ability to break your enemy's block, your technomancy powers, and the orders you issue to your companion.

It may sound fairly simple at first, but in practice, it can be a nightmare to get through fights if you don't know what you're doing; even on the easiest difficulty setting. This is where I discovered the one major flaw in Mars: War Logs' combat- the companions. Being able to control whether or not your companions should focus on melee attacks, dodging, or ranged attacks may sound like a blessing, but that's completely squandered once you realize that enemies will gang up almost exclusively on your companion, so unless you set them to dodge, they're going down in just a couple of hits from multiple enemies. So I devised a routine to account for this problem. Set your companion to focus on dodging, take out the out any ranged enemies, then pick off the enemies ganging up on your companion one by one. This routine makes combat a breeze, but enemy encounters begin to get stale. While not fatal, this flaw definitely does hurt an otherwise great combat system.

Outside of combat, Mars: War Logs is a fairly open exploration game. While not an "open world game" per-se, Mars: War Logs' open, non-linear level design is great. You'll be able to visit multiple locations around Mars ranging from a hellish prison camp to a decaying ghetto and even a war torn city; all full of side quests with interesting characters and stories. It's clear that a monumental amount of love went into fleshing out these characters and locations to create a seemingly living breathing world. Even if that world is a sun scorched hell hole ravaged by war and human atrocities.

The side quests, and even some of the early main quests, introduce the player to Mars: War Logs' morality system. Now before you roll your eyes so far back that you snap your optic nerve, I am happy to report that Mars: War Logs is one of the few games on the market today that properly utilizes a morality system. I'm sure we're all used to morality systems in games being as simple as "be a jerk for absolutely no reason other than receiving weapon that is slightly better than the one you're using right now" or "be a goody two-shoes and get nothing other than a nice big thumbs up from the game for being a good person." While there definitely are some side quests that end like that, most of the quests in Mars: War Logs end in moral ambiguity, and it is imperative that you understand which decision will affect your moral standings with a companion and/or faction. Something you may believe to be beneficial to whomever gave you the quest may in fact cause your companion to grow suspicious of you and even eventually distrust you.

As I said before, my initial discovery of Mars: War Logs was while browsing the Xbox Live marketplace, so my first playthrough of this underrated gem was on my poor old Xbox 360. Of course, that being said, the graphical fidelity of Mars: War Logs on console was... okay. Obviously not up to par with the latest AAA or even most middle market releases at the time, but also nothing that made my eyes bleed. On PC, however, Mars: War Logs actually doesn't look half bad. Facial and clothing textures are well detailed, expansive Mars vistas are a sight for sore eyes, and all at a buttery smooth 60 frames per second on any PC built before the turn of the century with little to no dips during transitions between loading areas.

Although I was hoping for a more synthesizer heavy soundtrack in a cyberpunk game, Mars: War Logs' soundtrack is actually quite incredible. Often times I found myself in a quiet area of the map just listening to the original score Sylvain Prunier crafted for Spiders. So props to you, Mr. Prunier. Listen for yourself.

While not necessarily a masterpiece, Mars: War Logs is a testament to proper RPG and game design the likes of which we haven't seen since the original Mass Effect. Undeserved hate and criticism comes with the territory in the middle market, but Mars: War Logs is one of the most undeserving of said hate and criticism of any middle market game I've ever experienced. The combat could have done with a bit more polishing and testing, and the side quests could have been a tad bit more unique, but if you're like me and often long for a proper role-playing experience, then do yourself a favor a pick up Mars: War Logs.