It's a fucking entourage of bullets and explosives and lasers and robots and everything going off all at once. Sensory overload doesn't begin to describe the feelings of being cornered into a boxed room by forever spawning spider-bots and teleporting chrono-troopers, and you make your way out with 2 lucky ricochet shots that pierce through their armor and cause them to explode in a chain of chaos.

The only real complete you can leverage is that after nearly 40 hours in the game I find myself wishing it was a little easier that way I can actually make it past the 3rd floor. The game is brutal and it's hard to know what makes what tick on your weapons. Passive and active items are really simple but the guns, the main focus of the game, come in so many variations and different stats that it's more overwhelming than the actual gameplay.

Of course I play the game not really worrying about that and not really taking it seriously, the core combat is so satisfying that I'm satisfied with what I have seen from the game so far even if it's barely scratching the surface.

Synthetik is the definition of a perfect roguelike, allowing you to take full control of the randomness and all the quirky mechanics (of which there are plenty), and just have fun killing dudes off while permantently tap-dancing on the razor's edge to some insane beats and sound effects - when it works.

Unfortunately, getting it to work takes a bit of time, trial and error, and maybe even consulting a guide on the internet. There are issues with class progression, whereby classes like the Raider and the Sniper feel straight up awful until you have leveled up sufficiently, which can take hours per class and is especially dumb with Raider, whose central mechanics of earning Dog Tags and killing people with his knife are actually useless untill you unlock some upgrades. Other classes have a tendency to feel nerfed to pieces until you level them up, which creates this weird difficulty progression where you have to just bash your head against the wall or conquer ever-incresingly difficult challenges for the game to actually get easier.

But that's pretty much the one main problem with this game, which is otherwise actually fantastic. The gameplay is fun and addictive, the sound-design and the music are incredibly memorable and punchy, the style is very charming, from the way the characters animate to the weapon art and the UI (which really only works on KBM, mind), and, in general, despite the high difficulty and complexity, it's one of the easiest roguelikes to enjoy. One of the best in the genre, no cap

2D roguelike shooter. After that, you might instinctively stop reading. I however would advise you to give this game a chance. It manages to do enough to set itself apart from “Enter the Gungeon” and others of this genre. Prepare yourself for a steep learning curve, as SYNTHETIK has many mechanics. They might seem intimidating at first, but they are what make SYNTHETIK fun and replayable. Add to that a great artstyle, satisfying gun play and a good soundtrack, and you have one of my favorite roguelikes.
Story
There is almost no story. In the beginning, you are told that you have to stop the robot uprising from launching Armageddon and that's about it.
Gameplay
When you first launch the game, you will be told to select a class, of which there are 8, after that you can choose a loadout. This includes starting weapon, items, and perks. After that, you will be ready to start a run. Typically, they consist of 4 stages and the final boss. Every stage consists of multiple floors. They are randomly generated and have a variety of enemies, objects, traps, and more rarely shops and treasure. Your goal is to get from the teleporter where you started to the exit. Unfortunately, for no one, are going to have to kill a lot of robots to get there. The tools for this job consist of many guns like the regular pistols and assault rifles to saw blade launchers and ion blasters. While these are powerful, they are also very rare. Don't worry, you can make do with just the common weapons, as everyone has a variant and four slots for modifications. These can completely change the gun. Some of my favorite include: fully automatic kar 98 and divine nailgun. After shooting and killing an enemy, you try to reload and notice that you lost the remaining rounds and have none in your gun. This is because you first eject your magazine to insert a new one. What this boils down to is a QTE every time you reload so that you skip a few fractions of seconds of you reload. Another oddity is heat that builds up and damages you if you fire for too long. There are also items divided into active and passive. You can only carry a limited amount of them, so you will have to discard weaker ones as you go along. You can also acquire buff to your stats or perks. They are rarely game changing, but multiple of them can make a difference. Once in a while you will encounter a boss, they can range from a Fighter jet to an armored transporter. One of the major differences from other 2D shooter is that you can't dodge most projectiles. The general strategy is to shoot a few rounds at an enemy, go behind cover, then either do it again, relocate or use an item. Overall, SYNTHETIK is a very replayable and has some of the best 2D action I've seen.
Graphics and artstyle
SYNTHETIK doesn't try to look realistic, but it might appear like it at first glacé. It manages to nail an artstyle perfect for its aesthetic. Other than that, the sound effects are some of the best I've heard. A headshot has never sounded more impactful.
Soundtrack
Hope you like synth wave, as that's the only thing this game has. Cyberpunk combat 2 is my favorite, also coincidently whenever it kicks in is also the time I rush into a group of enemies with no hope of survival.
Final Thoughts
Hey, hey people

Hey Hey people, Sshien here.

Have you, watched Sseth’s video about this game? If you haven’t, go watch it, and then, come back. SYNTHETIK: LEGION RISING is a rougelite that I actually, really like. I’ve played a small number of roguelites and roguelikes this year, including Shotgun King, Necrodancer, Slay the Spire, and Real Life. And I haven’t really enjoyed any of them nearly as much as when I hop into a voice call every week for the last 7 months with my best mate, a modern day Diogenes and CEO of the Olive Oil OPEC Cartel from the great land of Brazil Lite, Rodas. We bought this game last Christmas to play together, and by jingo, we jingo’d our asses right into a deeper bromance by experiencing all of this game’s highs and lows carbon fibre shoulder-plate to hypersteel shoulder plate. And that’s fucking awesome. As Sseth put it, SYNTHETIK is a symphony of firearms, machinery, and adrenaline mixed with fast acting opioids, which your character shoots approximately once every 10 seconds. This game is TIGHT, fast paced, frantic, and demanding of you to be bringing your SSS game for the entire 1 hour run. You need to understand your class, its role, and the items and builds you will likely synergize with through pure trial, error, and intuition. And when you get strategy just right, pick up the luck bonus modules, and get good item drops, you go from “it’s gonna be joever soon” to “WE’RE SO FUCKING CRACKED BRO” (those were actual quotes from the run we beat the game with).

When you get on a roll towards the end of a run, you feel like the God of the facility, exacting holy revenge on the murderbots out to tear you heart from wire and brain from CPU. Which is all well and good because, STORY. You are here to stop an infinite paperclip scenario playing out, orchestrated by a rogue AI who is self-stylizing as a God of War. And that’s all the story you get and need with a game like this. Its mechanics and euphoric gameplay do ALL the heavy lifting, so you just sit back, and let your natural biological aversion for all things artificial and intelligent from taking your job as a cracked crackhead supersoldier. GRAPHICS AND SOUND compliment this game extremely well. The devs made excellent use of their game’s limitations to decorate their slaughterfest with beautifully simplistic art that doesn’t look realistic, but not cartoony either. I think SYNTHETIK will go down as a game that “still looks good after decades”. The sound design is incredible. It compliments your adrenaline rush with dopamine releasing audio cues and highly satisfying sound effects, from gunfire, to reloading, jamming, and the sweet sound of a new upgrade making you FEEL like you just got something powerful. All set to a banger soundtrack that goes from low bassy stealth tunes to full blown phonk bangers that get the adrenaline pumping and get you in the zone to FUCK. SHIT. UP.

After 13.5 hours, I made it to the final boss for the first time, and the adrenaline hit I took while attempting it for the first time was the biggest I’ve had in YEARS. That was when I knew this game was something else. Over the course of the next 11 hours of gameplay, Rodas and I experienced many runs that could have gone to the end, only to die on floor 4 or the final boss gauntlet. Sometimes to our own stupidity, sometimes to janky bullshit as a result of the robot god sabotaging the undersea cables linking Europe with Australia, and spiking his ms to 300 ping. Every time we worked together, fucked up, laughed, we strategized, learned, and parted for the next run in a few days. When we finally beat the final boss after 24.5 hours of playtime on my end, the sound we made the moment we beat the game can only be described as pure, masculine bro-hype. The kind you hear when an squad of sweats win their first CS:GO regional tournament. It was glorious, a truly well fought dopamine rush of such beauty that all men should seek to earn. AND THEN SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENED. But you’re going to have to see that for yourself. So go ahead, buy SYNTHETIK. It is WELL worth the price. Earn your victory on top of a pile of burning wreckage and silicon guts at the top of ARMAGEDDON.

All these years I waited for THE ROGUE-LITE. And wondered why there no game like this.

Both 1) realistic, 2) weapon based, 3) online-coop, 4) with normal conntection, 5) with lot of content.

And here it is. It's like that, no more, no less.

This game lacks style and story. It's like a mechanism - unattractive, pointless, but pefectily working in all its functions.

And maybe you don't need no story or style.

16.7hrs played by the time of review

Pretty fun mechanically but kinda becomes the same thing over and over.

There is a variety of guns but they all feel mostly the same.