SYNTHETIK: Legion Rising

Usually I wait until I've 100%ed a game before dropping a review, but [b]♥♥♥♥[/b] it, I gotta gush about this game for a bit first. [i]I'll finish getting the rest of the achievements later.[/i] I've been burned out on roguelikes for a while now. Just found them to be overly long, tedious, annoying gambling simulators where whether you win or lose is 90% RNG. Especially egregious in cases like Nuclear Throne where there is literally zero human-made design and enemy patterns boil down to a random chance every frame to shoot and/or move to a random location. Meaning enemies could fire bursts of bullets either every half a second or every 10 seconds with zero real pattern or reason for it. I couldn't stand that 90% of indies now seem to be copy-and-pasted roguelikes, thinking they were all just designed (or... not designed, since it's all RNG and no human design) in that same way. [b]This game got me to appreciate roguelikes again. Almost every single thing that annoys me about roguelikes is alleviated or completely circumvented here, somehow.[/b] So just let me gush for a second as someone who [i]thought[/i] he hated roguelikes. [b]The item pool having a lot of useless filler in it?[/b] You can recycle ANY item on command, and get a bunch of money for it that you can use in shops. It's a global mechanic, but there's a class who completely revolves around this, being able to generate more items out of recycled ones and getting buffs from using or recycling items. You also get a limited amount of "arrow seals" from the item list in the main menu, allowing you to raise or lower the chances of specific items appearing, so you can tailor your item drops to the kind of build you're going for. Raise the chances of getting your favorite items, reduce the spawnrates of your most hated items to nigh-zero. [b]RNG?[/b] Enemies in this game have EXTREMELY clear and designed-for AI and patterns. There's sightlines, cover, aggro rules, they can find you and then lose track of you if you hide, allowing you to go around and flank them. They're not dumb either, they're smart and will do suppressive fire, throw grenades behind cover, and try to flank you themselves, they're just VERY clear pattern-wise and not RNG-bound like a lot of other roguelikes I've played. Also, again, recycling and customizable droprates allow you to all but guarantee you'll get at least SOMETHING you want at some point. [b]Long progression grind?[/b] You get XP boosters every day, to help you level your class quicker. Not only that, you can also use "data" gathered from your runs to straight up buy class XP on the spot. You can even apply difficulty-raising modifiers to boost your XP gain even further, to reward you for taking on the challenge. And if you don't feel like levelling every class to high levels to get your "total"/research level up, you can prestige each class to reset their level to 1 (allowing for even more levelling on whatever class you like), gaining a permanent extra perk in the process. Everything you do here contributes to SOMETHING, even if it's just gaining likely-boosted XP from a failed run. You can use that data to boost your next run, or unlock [i]something[/i] somewhere. There's always something to do, and no run feels like it was a waste of your time. [b]Lack of balance?[/b] Yeah, sure, not all weapons or items are made equal, but, again... You can recycle things. You can raise the chances of getting the items you want. And even then the "worse" lower-tier weapons tend to have unique effects to them that give them SOME kind of niche. Like the lower-tier crossbow that's not as good as red-tier snipers, but has a snowball effect unique to it boosting its damage with headshots and kills. It's got a niche of its own, it's not just instantly worse than something else in the game! You can boost your literal luck stat in-game for better chances of finding good items too, and/or recycle useless things to ensure you can buy a high-tier weapon from one of the shops, which will likely have the items you marked for higher spawn rates. Even trash items are good in their own way and have a use as a means to an end (getting something else that you actually want). [b]Dying instantly to some RNG ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and losing a 40-minute run?[/b] You have [i]recharging Halo shields[/i] as a global mechanic in this game. These basically ensure that it's almost impossible to insta-die from anything outside of the most extreme of conditions (like nuking yourself trying to recycle a nuclear core), since most things will empty your shields before they even touch your health. So you have a chance to recover. [b]This game is SO FUN in general, dude. So far I've just been gushing about the things that it does well as someone who was completely burned out on roguelikes, and I didn't even get into the gameplay itself.[/b] It's a tactical top-down shooter, with a heavy emphasis on precision (headshots/bullet spread based on distance and movement) and smart use of the terrain (cover, sightlines, making noise, flanking enemies and making them lose track of you). It has two-player co-op too, and it's INCREDIBLY fun! There's a ton of classes to pick from, all of them really varied in playstyles, and there's a ton of class synergies you can do in multiplayer. No class is bad. Everyone is useful in their own way. Really if I have even [i]two[/i] complaints, they'd probably be: -Multiplayer gets crashes from time to time, STILL not sure what exactly causes it but do keep that in mind -The odd amount of DLC and how much it inflates the game's price overall (basically more than doubling it)... But thankfully none of it's necessary to 100% the game, or even to get an "advantage" of any kind. (and none of it's P2W or outclasses anything in the main game, again going back to that "even lower-tier items have their niche" thing from earlier) I can't recommend this game enough, really. It's probably one of the best, most carefully fine-tuned roguelikes I've ever played.