The Surge
Skip · RPG · 2017
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $14.99.
- Length
- 20.9h
- Value
- $0.72/hr
- Reviews
- 75% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, 1 GB, AMD Radeon R7 360 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti, 15 GB of storage. Windows only.
Welcome to CREO, the megacorporation saving the world! A catastrophic event has knocked you out during the first day on the job… you wake up equipped with a heavy-grade exoskeleton, in a destroyed section of the complex.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.94. That was November 2023. It has been discounted 85 times in the 10 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 28 percent on value. It is pricier than 77 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, LIZARDS MUST DIE ($3.99, scores 82) beats it on value, while it beats The Surge 2 ($29.99, scores 37).
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 10 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2024 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 43 percent of the 696 reviews written there were positive, against 75 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it.
20.9 hours to finish it, 50 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.4 times the campaign.
The drop-off
92% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
92 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I tried very hard to get into this game. I loved the surge 2 and i love unique takes on the soulslike genre, mainly ones that take place in anything other than medieval times. This game just sucks the life out of you with little to no reward. Enemies are tedious to fight, the neat lock-on and dismember system is clunky, attacks across the board are slow and cumbersome, damage taken is extreme, the zones are...
There's a lot of good in this game, but there are too many game breaking bugs. Here are some examples: 1. Character randomly decides to dodge forward, dying in the process. 2. Lots of places where you clip through the world and get stuck in nothing, or slip through geometry and die. 3. A bunch of crash-to-desktop situations. 4. A lot of unexplained mechanics, e.g. how blocking works, what attacks can be jumped, what...
I love this game and consider it my favourite non-FROMSOFT soulslike, owning it on 3 platforms now. Its not without its issues though, it has clunky gameplay definitely akin to a less polished Dark Souls 1, a high lethality (especially early game before you get a build going), and can be pretty labyrinthian at times with rough boss design, with a narrative built up around way too many generic Sci-Fi tropes and an...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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The Surge scores 43/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/378540/the-surgeThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.