The Surge is my first experience with a Dark Souls clone (unless you count Bloodborne, but that at least came from the same dev), a genre that I hadn't realized until recently even existed. I bought it because I liked the idea of a sci-fi Souls-esque game, but all it's really done is show me that it was never the basic formula or the difficulty that I loved about the Souls series or Bloodborne. It's things like the intricate level design, the beautiful visuals, the broad variety of enemies in terms of both their designs and movesets, the thrilling boss battles, and even the intriguing, minimalist stories and lore. If you don't have a dev as creative and talented as From working on the game, what are you left with?
Spoiler warning, you're left with The Surge. It's a shallow, superficial ripoff of the Souls formula with none of the depth or imagination that made From's games such rich experiences. The levels (of which there aren't many) are all dull, ugly, and gray in very similar ways, and rely on nonsensically convoluted maze-like designs to disorient the player and pad out the game. 90% of the enemies you fight are just generic mechs like the player character, only varying in their armor and weapons. The difficulty is overwhelmingly of the artificial variety, and the only way the dev could seem to think to provide more challenging experiences later in the game is just to jack up the existing enemies' attack and defense. The story is obvious right from the start - seriously, in the very first scene, the first thought that'll pop into your head is correct. It's a standard robots-go-bad plot, with zero surprises. Add to that mediocre voice acting and yet another generic dark-haired white guy hero*, and blah. I'm probably being a bit too harsh on the game. It's not the worst thing ever. It's really just mediocre, maybe even passable when I try not to compare it to From's games. It just feels like such a wasted opportunity.
*I am so fucking sick of the generic dark-haired white guy being the standard hero of video games nowadays. Why? Why the fuck do devs keep going back to this same shallow archetype again and again and again and again and again and fucking again? Is it the result of market research or something? And no, I'm not saying it has to be a black trans woman in the name of social justice or whatever, but surely deviating from this standard just a little wouldn't get gamers REEEEEEEEEing, would it? Like, nobody complained that Geralt wasn't dark-haired. Same with BJ Blazkowicz, a character I'm convinced is essentially a parody of the kind of man every male gamer wishes they were. We aren't all snarky, somewhat rebellious, dark-haired white guys in our twenties or thirties. That archetype doesn't fucking "represent" us.