SYNTHETIK: Legion Rising

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

yes

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

this is a good game.

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

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.