The first game was pretty much the best Soulslike, with a lot of interesting ideas, fun combat and setting, short duration, and a medbay ("bonfire") song that got stuck in your head.
The Surge 2 makes significant improvements to the combat. It was already good, but it adds more things to it. I would dare to say that this is the best combat system in a Soulslike game. On top of that, the game adds a lot of QoL improvement that make the entire gameplay quite pleasant.
The confined spaces of the CREO complex are now changed with the open spaces of the city of Jericho. The level design is as convoluted and trypophobia-inducing as in the first game, but there are more visual cues and the environments look more distinct, so, overall, navigating is less frustrating. Here, again, we have perhaps the best level design in a Soulslike. Later in the game, you also get hooks that help you traverse larger distances and a fast travel system that comes a bit too late. However, the main reason for backtracking in the first game was to get lower lever items to craft and upgrade your gear, but that problem has been solved with the ability to downgrade higher level items.
Not so good is visual performance. I haven't seen a game so far that so badly needed RT. The lighting is just so bad. Also, it uses Vulkan and it has a lot of stability issues. It should be fine, though, if you cap the FPS at the level your graphics card can handle.
For some reason, the devs thought it was a great idea to abandon Warren and to let you create your own character instead. That would have been indeed a great idea if there were any PvE/PvP in the game, or, at least, if there were builds... but no, there's just a character creator for no reason and Warren has become a banal side quest.
The story wasn't exactly great in the first game, but at least it was hard sci-fi. Now you have human bosses that can fly instead of industrial machinery. They thought they ought to just imitate From Software instead of being original, I guess.
Disappointing in many aspects compared to its predecessor, The Surge 2 is still one of the best Soulslikes, if not the best Soulslike out there. It adds a lot of good stuff in terms of gameplay, but there are also some baffling changes. We were so close to having the perfect sci-fi Soulslike, but it wasn't meant to be.
