SYNTHETIK 2 Reviews

The more they add features, the worse it feels. A big selling point of Synthetik 1 is the simple, straightforward UI. Everything is right in front of you as soon as you launch the game. Synthetik 2 had this, albeit a slightly worse one. With the advent of Grand Operations, all of the UI elements are now, by design, cumbersome and slow. Edit your class? Enter the specific room and watch the slow animation. Play a mission? No, you don't walk towards the helipad, you walk towards the innocuous command center, watch the slow animation, select a mission, and then watch your character walk towards the helipad. Movement is more sluggish. Many weapons feel incredibly weak compared to Synthetik 1 counterparts. The usefulness of said weapons also varies extremely. While in Synthetik 1, you can literally make a weapon with the modifier "weak" possibly sweep whole stages, now it feels like it's a 2/5 chance that the weapon you get will sell the game for you. Same can be said about items. Synthetik 1 is more put together, more consistent in its design, and more consistently fun. Also, it doesn't have the stereotypical commander annoyingly narrate your game.... yeah.

The new "big" update makes the game a pain to play. The overworld means it takes longer to do anything, any they did something that causes the entire game to stutter like crazy.

I'm genuinely not sure where the direction is going with this game - and why. As others have recently stated, the new 'HQ' system sucks. It's convoluted, it takes an animated transition to enter each building or menu, and it's redundantly opaque in keeping statistics, 'dictionary' information, and so on now locked behind an upgrade system. In the first 10 minutes of trying this system, I was soft-locked three, separate times, requiring an ALT+F4 since the pause menu wouldn't respond. The first game could be played within less than 20 seconds from start if you were familiar with the menu placement, now it takes about 20 seconds to get to the first screen of deployment, assuming you don't need to manage anything else. It's a frustrating, wasteful experience that actively dissuades you from starting another round, knowing that you'll have to load back into the HQ overworld and navigate through every single interface roadblock again. The worst part is that you can see that so much time and so many resources were sunk into this very awful system that it seems unlikely they'll do the simple thing and gut it. You have to wonder why the plug wasn't pulled sooner, it's glaringly obtuse. This, coupled with an otherwise sluggish development pace that is lacking on what players actually want: content. In terms of actual, tangible variety in firearms, the first game still dwarfs the first in every single weapon category. So I have to ask - where is the direction of development really going - and why?

Straight down grade from the original game. From visuals to feedback to classes. Enemies are needlessly tanky now, it's no longer a quick twitchy twin stick shooter but slow and methodical and just dull.

I stopped playing this WEEKS ago because of the "Grand Operations" UI change, and I'm still left totally baffled by it. There are so many redundant menus in order to start playing the game. And the UI bloat is still prevalent in game when checking your android's stats, your weapon stats, or even just going through the pause menu. Why do I have to walk to a building in a scrap yard, view an animation to enter it, select solo or online, teleport to a helipad to select difficulty and confirm player gear, wait, then wait again for the loading screen, THEN I can play? Some of these steps can be circumnavigated by going through the pause menu in the military base(?). But just minimize the menus. I'm aware that these are the risks when paying for an early access title, but how is it that after nearly 4 years that every major update has a substantial UI change that makes me relearn how to navigate the game so I can play it? Just play the first game, it's actually finished, snappy, and fun.

I will update this review now that I have played a bit more, I've progressed a bit further into the 'buildings', and have gotten a taste of whats to come. If you want the short version of this: Don't buy this for full price, pick it up when its on sale or go to G2A, or some other key distribution site. While I can't condone it, I wouldn't blame anyone for going sailing. The most recent update that took more than a year to release was an absolute nothing burger. Go play the first game, you'll probably have more fun. There have been creative additions to the game since the first that I genuinely like and appreciate, though it feels like they've also stripped a lot from the first game as well, both actual mechanics and general feel of the game, this does not feel like a sequel to the first, merely its own game. Some of the classes also just feel like they fall behind without getting good items. They don't start on equal grounds and generally fall behind quicker if you don't get lucky with weapons, upgrades, equipment, etc. Not to mention it feels like you fall behind really easily IN GENERAL, if you don't get lucky. The constructions that have uses, such as the medical tent and barracks, have *three* purchasable upgrades that have *an* effect on your game. Usefulness varies. The upgrades that are locked behind a time gate feel like band-aid upgrades that could really just be applied. Though if I were to guess the time-gates are there so you can't fucking refund the game after a certain point because curiosity led you on. Don't give into the curiosity, it really isn't worth it. The armory is the weapon tinkering feature ripped from the first game, the one where you can increase/decrease and upgrade weapons, fucked up, and time-gated. The thought process behind this genuinely fails to come to me, but perhaps there was good reason, who knows. The mods are also time-gated, at least the in-game menu to actually enable and download them. You can still download them from mod.io but I'm fairly certain you HAVE TO navigate through the in-game menu to actually enable them. Genuinely baffling. I can't even say unlocking the mods was worth it because most of the mods that were actually fun or a must-have are probably no longer worked on. They function to a REASONABLE degree still, but I can't really confirm this completely. I don't blame the authors for dropping work. As for the FLAIR buildings: The library tells you core details about the game's mechanics. For someone who doesn't know a single thing, this is useful for about a day. For someone who has ample time playing the first game, completely useless. It provides no over function. The mail box. It lets you collect your daily paycheck, and lets you see notifications on character levels. Unless I'm missing something, there is no other use. Radio. The radio lets you change through the limited selection of songs on the title screen, and advertises their communities and their incomplete wiki. No other uses. Its a plug for their communities and a necessary time-gate. The super computer. While its dubious to call this useless, its sole function is to give you android data to unlock more classes. I'm not certain if this is the only way to obtain android data now, but as it stands, I'm certain most people who played before this update have every class unlocked. Nothing-burger. I think the most confusing part that they changed from the first game is not allowing you to upgrade weapon stats with spare upgrade kits? I'm not sure if its something they've just forgotten to add or are purposely ignoring, but my favorite thing about when I have a good run is carrying around twenty-five different upgrade kits that I can't fucking use. The worst part is how the game constantly reminds me that I have upgrade kits that I can't use, especially when it blocks my ammo counter so I don't know if I'm about to be shafted after completely depleting my reserve. This entire update that added barely anything was pushed as a 'major' update, and we waited more than a year for it. While I sincerely hope the game gets better, or they learn about what the fuck happened here- I'm not confident I can say whether or not this was the nail in the coffin. As a wise man once said, I hope its been worth the wait.

with the new base update, I can't recommend this game at this time. Replacing a menu with a 3D map is not a good idea. Having to unlock basic things like basic game tips or THE GODDAMN MOD SUPPORT (the mod browser is awful too, you can't use it without creating an account for mod dot io, you can't see the description of mods) the performance are worse than ever. I was able to run the game fine on my intel I7 and RTX 3070 on high quality, but now I still get frame drops in medium quality and 50 DLSS.

Just wanted to go ahead and leave my review as I feel like this game is getting a lot of unjustified hate, it's not perfect but the developer is making strides in the right direction by making the gameplay similar to S1, while providing new changes that in-time, will work better with the game. - Base of operations is pretty lackluster and buggy currently, but I'm sure will improve overtime. This is your source of meta-progression along with leveling up your androids. - Gunplay is feeling closer to Synthetik 1, with Androids having completely different play-styles depending on class, sub-class, and weapons chosen. - Subclasses need some work, some of them provide completely new ways to play the class while others feel very lackluster and not fleshed out. - Weapon variety should be improved, I wish there was a better way to focus what types of weapons I wanted to find instead of individual guns, would be nice to target all sniper rifles, or AR's, etc instead of one gun. Would allow me to find more weapon types that fit with my class. - More weapons from the first game would be great. Biggest issue for me is lack of Polish and a huge amount of tiny bugs that impact the experience, if you want something that's a good mixture between Hotline Miami and Terminator this is the game for you, it's a small developer and they can use all the support they can possibly get. Highly recommend it!

This game is much like a one-hit wonder artist trying to repeat their big hit. While S1 had its own problems (looking at you multiplayer netcode) its core concept did not need to change much. Instead of expanding upon what made S1 good, S2 throws out everything good about S1 for no real reason. Every change in S2 exists because of a "why not?" mentality instead of thinking about what specific parts of S1 needed iteration. My frustration with the game can be summed by by an interaction I had with Shrike on the S2 discord regarding the balance of the Recon/sniper class. In S1, sniper had a passive which created mines when you killed enemies via headshot. Back then, that had been replaced by an explosive headshot in S2. I told Shrike that the removal of the mine was a big nerf to the defensive ability of the class, as you now got rushed way easier. He in turn, called me retarded and insisted that the mine-ability was stupid and would never return. Who could have guessed that the same mine ability would return during the next major patch? Avoid this game. Go play the original

Most mind-boggling update I've ever seen. Over a year of nothing and now the game has a worse user interface.