The limb cutting mechanic for The Surge has a new trailer to try and show it off as well as the loot and crafting system that The Surge will employ
Here we go with yet another video for The Surge and this time it is slated toward a mechanic I have been trying to wrap my head around in the game. Deck 13 has stated that there is a limb cutting mechanic in the game and has shown it off a few times before. From what I’ve seen in the past for The Surge it looks like just how it sounds as limbs do come off when hit, but what I have yet to understand is just how we do this without just flailing wild and hoping for the best. May 16th is only so far away and seeing as this is a selling point of The Surge it would be nice to have an understanding before I make the purchase on my PS4, Xbox One, or PC.
That is of course why we are here today as the latest trailer for The Surge is supposed to cover just this aspect of the game as well as the loot and equipment functionality. Without any further gilding the lily here, let’s have a look at just how all of this should work in The Surge.
The Surge — Target, Loot, And Equip
The Surge empowers players by giving them control over what they loot from defeated enemies. Target specific body parts before damaging them with a combination of vertical and horizontal attacks; the dismembered part then determines which piece of equipment is looted―the schematic corresponding to the sliced armor part, salvaged materials for crafting the corresponding piece, or even the weapon wielded by the enemy. This means that when approaching an enemy, players face a difficult decision: do they target an unarmored body part for a shorter fight, or risk a lengthier, more damaging battle for a chance at slicing off a shiny new piece of equipment?
And…I’m still lost.
While we do get to see more of the limbs flying off in The Surge, it still is not clear to me on just how that gameplay aspect works. It looks like we have a Fallout style indicator for each of the enemies we come across, but given that the following gameplay doesn’t always show the first hit going to said limb, it still looks like it is a swing and pray type of thing. The only thing I can think is that we can select specific parts of the body, in some cases multiple parts, and then let the animation play out. This is not the way I was led to believe The Surge would play from before, but that is how it feels here. Unless the video was cut just to show off the blood and limbs and not how the mechanic truly works.
I do like the fact that it looks like we can one-hit kill some of the enemies in The Surge with a well-placed limb strike. Then again as we don’t fully know how the mechanic is implemented we could just be seeing the aftermath of a flurry of blows that led to an enemy being cut in half. Or that we have to truly sneak up on someone to get the skull-cracking ax strike. I wish Deck 13 would just put something out to fully explain it all here already. That would make it so much easier to know if The Surge is going to work well out of the box or if it will be a trial by fire kind of thing. At least all of this in the terms of limb severing. The part we all care about.
What say you on The Surge‘s limb cutting mechanic as it has been shown again? Is it odd that this late in the development cycle we still have not been given the finer details on something that they are pushing with? Do you think it is as basic as just flail and pray or is it more cinematic and using a system like Fallout for called shots? Let us know your thoughts on all of this down in the comments and then discuss. As we learn more for The Surge, so will you. As long as you keep checking in the site here that is. We’ll have everything we can for the game here so be sure to keep checking back in.