SYNTHETIK: Legion Rising

Seven years after release this game still punches way above its weight. The music is incredible, the gameplay loop is addictive, the weapons feel and sound crisp. This game can be hard, but not for the sake of being hard. It is a melody made from headshots, explosions. dashes and the 'clinnnng' active reloads. It is a painting made from spent casings, discarded magazines, machine oil and android blood. I cannot recommend Synthetik enough, it is a rogue-lite gem and it stands as a unique and extremely well-executed game.

Has lots of guns. (and 2 player coop and nice ost)

Game has great gameplay feedback loop, one of the better rougelites out there.

Great game, played it a lot and still feel like playing it every now and then. Has a significant learning curve (to get used to the controls and to the very low time to kill). The game has a lot of good game design behind it, though no game is perfect and there are some sore spots as with every game. I love the CO-OP perk team slot, it opens up so many fun loadouts and is the reason why I play this game so much. While I love the game and will continue to play it, after 300h of playing I have found lots of various issues scattered across the game. I'd like to give some feedback here on as many of these issues as I can, starting with those that I find to be most important. This section is more directed towards the developers, than towards potential buyers. Starting with CO-OP, the mode is quite littered with bugs. Lots of things aren't synchronized properly (most non-stat based weapon attachments don't work when you give your gun to your coop partner, eg. Backup Printer, Eraser Cell, etc.) The coop player that joined the lobby (no the host) will sometimes crash upon teleporting to the next floor (seems entirely random to me thus far, seems like a 1/100 chance or smth around that ballpark). Outside of coop, the issues are vastly less intrusive, but there are still some: Some items descriptions are very unhelpful (Fusion Orb comes to mind, "Increases specific abilities of 'Orb' items, including reality ripper.", what does it actually do? lower cooldowns? increase orb damage? The description doesn't say. Other items don't tell you about the full extent of what they do, did you know: - Powershot reduces the current weapon's heat by 5 every time it activates, making it a mush-have for fast-shooting guns with overheat issues. This feature is not shown in the item desc. - Most projectile shooting items increase weapon heat when used, including some that make no sense (Each use of Kunai Throwing Knives increases heat by 15) - Shield Link sets user's shields to 0 upon activation, description does not say this should happen - Incubus only drains user's health, while description states the drain is meant to apply to the whole level (even says "ALL" in all caps) A similar issue happens to Recycling Bonuses of certain items, which are supposed to be revealed with the appropriate lab research. Last Stand, Rosarius, and Divine Reconstructor don't shot their Recycle Bonus even with the research. On the topic of items themselves, their balancing is inconsistent: - Blood Rite and Shieldburst are complete garbage, exist only to be recycled - Eclipse is terrible if not for a bug I will talk about later - Fan of Knives barely does anything to enemies and kills your coop teammates all the time - Projectile Items can proc off of your teammate's or friendly summon's shots/kills/deaths causing your character to randomly kill themselves with those items while taking cover. Beyond that, there are plenty of very weird items interactions, mostly on behalf of the beam items as well as synergy items: - NEVER have an Energy Link be the only item in your inventory, if energy link is off-cooldown in that situation the game will crash - Every single consumable items somehow manages to interact with shaker differently somehow: - - Upgrade kit is sometimes affected... sometimes it isn't - - Core upgrade kit is not affected at all - - Module Cores are "affected" and gain more charges but the item disappears entirely when used regardless of how many charges are left - - Custom Upgrade Kits are always affected and don't disappear so long as you drop and pick them up after every use - - Chaos Potion is affected and stacks regen just fine up to 10 uses, then you need to drop and pick it back up. I also have a problem with how the game's loop system works. On top of buffing enemies, making them scarier and scarier, the game makes the bizarre choise to gradually weaken the player as well (this is without Armageddon Shard mind you, which is what's supposed to weaken the player to end a run). And the stats the game chooses to weaken is terrible, reducing the player's healing received to the point of complete ineffectiveness, increasing damage taken by the player, reducing the player's Scavenging stat. This made loop extremely hard to enjoy without getting incredibly lucky with engineer, or bugging out the game in coop to have 1 player not get the loop debuffs. The Conveyor boss is pretty much universally disliked, and one of the best features of playing CO-OP is that this boss cannot spawn there. the Instakill zones on the sides are just not fun to deal with, and the boss itself is just inferior design to Raptor Type-E or the APC. The reward to putting up with it is also lower then the other 2, not even vibing the player a boss crate to open and only a small amount of time to organize themselves before being forcefully teleported to the next floor. Even before the player fights the boss, the fact that the boss is the Conveyor Room immediately hurts the player via lower rewards, and also has worse gameplay to boot. This is probably my biggest gripe with the game. Now, onto the much more minor issues: - Madness Accelerators / Saturn 7 Heavy Tanks don't rotate their chassis to move in the game, while they do in the trailer and older gameplay videos. It looks like Ultimate Update broke that, so now the tanks look extremely silly while moving - The Tanks' AI is also extremely dumb, often refusing to move (especially in the 2 Tanks room before Last Defender). The Madness Accelerator specifically will sometimes refuse to even shoot at a player standing in the open near the tank instead electing to stare menacingly at the player. - The Friendly Summon AI is simmilarly bad at times, with Gun/Missile Drones refusing to acknowledge groups of enemies shooting at them (even when hit they can refuse to notice the enemy). Stationary Summons don't have this issue, they will almost always notice an enemy that shot and hit them.

This game feels underrated af. Idk how I stumbled on this game but I really like it, I just need a player 2 could be me but if you can play a roguelike coop I NEED to play it coop. The aesthetic feels nice the loop is not perfect but the weapon diversity and the upgrade mechanic is amazing!

Let me preface this review by saying that I have over 1.5k hours, but most of them are offline or played on the GOG version. [h3]Possibly the worst netcode ever written, rife with exploits and bugs[/h3] [list] [*]Upgrade terminals often go missing for the client [*]Horrible lag compensation - enemies take longer to kill and damage is delayed with higher ping. [*]Both players can use a single use chest if they start opening at the same time. [*]Extremely strange interactions when both players pick up an item [list] [*]Rings are completed when the other player just walks over it [*]Whether buffs from weapon attachments are shared is highly inconsistent [*]You can get a 8 attachments on a single weapon with an arcane sequence of upgrading by both players [/list] [*]Crashes. Tons of crashes. [*]Indestructible, hitboxless enemies that do nothing and persist through levels. [*]All dropped guns teleport to dropped timed weapons when they explode [/list] [h3]Gamebreaking bugs in general[/h3] [list] [*]Crashes, again. [*]Your item bar can freeze and become uninteractable [*]The entire game will often freeze for seconds at a time [/list] [h3]Poor balancing[/h3] [list] [*]Item balancing is horrible. It's like the devs never played their own game; item rarity seems to mostly based on how cool the name sounds, rather than their actual utility. Around half of the red (legendary) are completely unusable or useful only for their recycling bonus. [*]Plasma guns are unviable. Not because of their gimmick, but simply because they do 0.3x damage to shields [*]420 Sniperdragon, commonly memed gun, is actually shit. Having to make a full turn every shot will just screw you over. [*]Most modules are unviable. Raider has 3 modules that completely outshine the rest. Engineer and Demolisher have the single best RAIDER module: Unceasing, which makes dashes refresh shields, reduce heat, and have reduced cooldown. WTF? [*]Sniper is not actually good with sniper weapons on higher difficulties, as slow-firing sniper weapons simply cannot deal with extreme enemy density. You need to just hit headshots with regular guns. [*]The lithium shotgun ammo mentioned earlier takes the two laser shotguns from overtuned to the overpowered. [/list] [h3]Many tooltips are completely wrong or missing crucial information.[/h3] [list] [*]The effects of different ammo types are unexplained. [list] [*]Dumbfire missiles have higher base damage than homing and cursor seeking ones. [*]Lithium shotgun ammo (which is unlocked with regular lithium ammo from the Eraser DMR, strangely) negates all damage falloff and range penalties compared to regular laser shotgun ammo with NO DOWNSIDES. [/list] [*]Item/module descriptions and cooldowns are mostly wrong. Many effects are rounded to the nearest percentage, which especially hurts on modules such as Routine, which show either 1 or 2%, but can occupy many values in between. [*]Tons of hidden effects - elaborated on next. [/list] [h3]Numerous exploits/quirks/bugs you can only figure out through hundreds of hours of playtime or digging through old reddit threads.[/h3] [list] [*]On the item trade terminal, you can simply drop all items and get an item for free in coop. [*]When you pray at a prayer terminal and get a blood rite, if your inventory is full it will be automatically recycled, but you will not gain a healing bonus. [*]Dashing with raider with the Charge module does not set iframes to a certain number, but rather adds to them. Therefore, if you dash fast enough with dash cooldown reducing items, you can accumulate iframes, becoming completely invincible permanently. [*]When dodging a shot, there is a small cooldown before you can dodge again. [*]Upgrade kits can be stacked, increasing the amount of damage they provide. However, this does not increase the chance to conserve them, despite the "extra kit chance" increasing in the item description. Kit conservation is based solely on luck. [*]Merging upgrade kits in co-op mode is stupid; if you pick up the more upgraded stack with the less upgraded one in your inventory, you lose the upgrades on the more-upgraded stack. [*]Powershot reduces heat by 5 when activating. This undocumented effect makes it one of the best heat control items in the game. [*]Whether an item's recycle effect scales with the item's power varies depending on the item and goes undocumented for many items. [*]Glider, phaser, and raider's dash invincibility are implemented differently. [list] [*]Glider invincibility makes them invincible to every source of damage *EXCEPT* damage-over-time status effects. [*]Phaser invincibility makes them absorb shots (which makes no sense, especially given the graphics), but they are still vulnerable to explosives, Raider's Reverbing Blade, and damage-over-time, making it extremely useful to carry a weapon that can deal with them while invincible. [*]Raider's dash invincibility makes you invincible to nearly EVERY SOURCE of damage. This includes damage-over-time effects, explosions, the damage from BLOOD DONATION TERMINALS????, and the NEGATIVE HEALTH REGENERATION FROM ARMAGEDDON SHARD. WTF??? [list] [*]The SOLE damage source you are not invincible is damage from curses. [/list] [/list] [*]Uncharged items secretly have a invisible charge count, stored as a SIGNED 16 BIT INTEGER. This means that non charge-based items, such as Powershot or Fangs of Mordigan, can only activate 2^15 times before becoming dead weight. WTF????? [*]Crux of the laser caster, likely due to being the last item, is bugged to never drop after a few runs. [*]Human Model 9000k's multi-hit feedback ability is simply broken. You do not regenerate rounds on multi-hits. [*]Fragile is a buff, as you can gain more HP from medical chests than you lost. [*]And many, many more... [/list] [h3]Terrain hitboxes are extremely janky. It is hard to tell whether you can fit through a gap. Often you will get stuck and have to slowly wiggle your way out.[/h3] [list] [*]This makes the Z1 shuriken extremely unpredictable, which is a shame, as it is a genuinely fun item. This also affects ricochets in general. [/list] [h3]The screw/heart core pickup system is horrible.[/h3] [list] [*]You will accidentally run into a heart core with a full item bar and no more enemies in the level, and no choice but to waste it. [/list] [h3]Loop is poorly balanced. All it amounts to is simple stat changes for you and your enemies, while cranking enemy spawns extremely high.[/h3] [list] [*]Builds that can reach late iterations of loop are rare and rely on abusing unbalanced mechanics, rather than skill. The only two I know of are abusing shaker (a synergy item that grants charges on items) and unidentified potion (which can grant random buffs on usage) or iframe stacking on raider. Reaching deep loop without these methods is near impossible, as the moment you are noticed, you will be dogpiled by enemies in under a second. ([url=https://old.reddit.com/r/Synthetik/comments/16boh5j/the_loop_20_experience/]See here.[/url]) [/list] [h3]Boss fights are horribly designed[/h3] [list] [*]Most bosses are single target bullet sponge bosses. They are simple DPS checks with attacks that are not fun to dodge. [*]The conveyor level is an excellent idea with horrible, *horrible* execution. [*]Armored transport is an amazing boss. You have to balance fighting enemies with pumping lead into the transport. [*]Devs don't seem to have learned their lesson, as Synthetik 2 has the same problems. Boss attacks are more telegraphed, but are still fundamentally flawed in that they don't fit the rest of the game. [/list] [h3]Enemies are stupid[/h3] [list] [*]Gliders will stack on top of you, where they can't hit you [*]Enemies do not use interesting tactics. They do not flank you, and simply charge at your location. I would expect more from future murderbots. [/list]

Great roguelike, shooty shooty bang bang. Action tempo designed to kill anyone above the age of 25

I'm probably gonna fry my steam deck buttons playing this game but I just can't stop

Awesome hyper tactical and very expressive third person shooting roguelike. It has good and dynamic combat, and the ability for you to go absolutely ham with certain playstyles. Try it out. It is very fun

One of the best of all time.

this is a good game.

Great game!

better than sex

Just lose yourself to the bullets

Dont skip this.

gud gaem

👍

yes

ye