The Surge

• The choice of rigs at the beginning of the game is largely pointless and you can fill out both armor sets fairly quickly just in the very first area. Lynx is the overall better choice than Rhino; broadly speaking dodging and to a lesser extent blocking will always be better than raw defense.

• Horizontal and vertical strikes are NOT weak and heavy attacks ala Dark Souls.

• Just because you're targeting a specific part of an enemy doesn't mean your strikes will automatically hit there, which is one reason to be mindful of horizontal vs. vertical. It's entirely possible to aim for one part and hit another.

• Experiment with your moveset. The game doesn't do a great job of explaining that attacking while running, attacking while jumping, and counterattacks are a thing and every weapon, even within the same class, tends to have slightly different attacks with their own quirks with regards to how and when they hit.

• Backstabs are also a thing but are usually only worth trying against un-aggroed enemies and are a bit fiddly even then. Sneak up on them until the targeting reticle turns yellow, then attack.

• When blocking you can hit up or down on the stick to jump or duck attacks, but actually making good use of it beyond avoiding very specific attacks is hard.

• You can equip multiple of the same injectable to get extra charges! Don't scrap your duplicates! Different grades will also work, but you'll have to swap between them.

• You can favorite weapons and drone abilities and can then hotswap between them using the D-pad (or equivalent) like you do with injectables.

• Every armor set in the game grants a set bonus for wearing all six pieces, but the only way to see what each one does in-game is putting them on and checking the stats screen. You're pretty much always better off just wearing a full set than mixing and matching.

• Drone skills are largely an afterthought since they use energy better spent on executions or healing via a specific chip. The very first one you get, the zappy laser, is fantastic though because you can use it uncharged and use it to pull (some) enemies.

• When the scrap bar in the bottom right of the screen fills up, your consumables get refilled. (Enemies will also sometimes drop extra consumable charges.)

• This dovetails with the slowly increasing scrap multiplier you get for using the execution move on enemies.

• The multiplier only resets when you use the medbay chair itself; you can still access the crafting station (and bank scrap!) without messing it up.

• However, entering a medbay at all will still reset all enemies.

• Ideally you want to get into a flow where you can comfortably fight enemies by damaging their armored parts rather than cutting through them by targeting non-armored sections, always kill them with the execution move, and subsequently build up a large store of crafting materials as well as a constantly increasing scrap multiplier (and thus extra healing charges beyond the norm).

• You don't need to upgrade weapons and armor linearly, as long as you have enough materials for a given tier you can upgrade directly to that tier, albeit for a slightly higher scrap cost. To put it simply, don't worry about farming lower level drops.

• Every boss has a special objective which fulfilling will get you a different version of their weapon drop. Since bosses don't respawn outside of running through NG+, just look up what they are if you care. Arguably the hardest one to get for a while is from the very first boss.

• In the second area, you can just break straight through the wire gates blocking off maintenance tunnels. This is critical for unlocking a few shortcuts and not wanting to tear your hair out.

• Also in the second area is an NPC looking for a staff weapon. The BioMaster you can find at the end of the area is perfect since there's a second available later in the game.

• And again in the second area, if you hear somebody suddenly whisper to you for some scrap, look around carefully. It's an NPC that leads into a sidequest, but on the plus side if you ignore her entirely you'll still eventually get a (unique) reward out of it.

• Davey's drugs are found in the next area, behind a drone-locked door. The main quest will send you back towards him by the time you find them, so don't worry about backtracking. You can also choose to keep the drugs since they're a unique biochip.

• If you see something in a glass case, you should probably try busting that thing open.