Recent reviews by Cook

Slay the spire with good art

The good stuff: The guns shoot realistically at first, but Synthetik deviates by favoring intense gameplay mechanics over realism. There's a lot of things happening in this game; the three or four weapons you can carry can overheat, you have to manually eject clips and actively reload them (gears of war style). Not only that, you can have 8 items (passive or active). With so many things going on that the player is responsible for, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Before the final boss, I always have to mentally prepare myself about which items are going to be used, and when. It's a skillful game I feel I have a lot of agency over my own success, despite it being a rogue-like with random elements.

Nitpicks: Since the game is intense, you'll likely die from a large amount of damage over a blink of an eye, rather than being slowly whittled down. To mitigate this, you can always stack up on defensive items to the point where that stops happening. This puts a premium on defensive items, yet 2/3rds of the items are offensive in nature, which means 2/3rds of the time, you'll have bad luck. This is a personal opinion of mine though; not all players gravitate to pure defense, and some of the most coveted items are offensive. The coop can get buggy at times. There can be memory leak issues. Both of these issues are being worked on, as far as upcoming patch notes reveal. Almost all rogue likes have that "easy first stage", where there's not much of a challenge, and you don't really lose any resources; Synthetik is no different. I wish there was a way to skip the first two stages through some sort of officiated option, but it's not yet possible. The game has a lot of cool mechanics and items, but at the same time there might be too many, because some of the mechanics need to be looked over and rebalanced; there's a lot of items in the game I just plain ignore, but at least the game gives you the power to do that. My last nitpick is the difficulty spike; the final stage is wayyyy harder than the stages preceding it.

Gameplay: It's a twin stick shooter. The shooting feels very satisfying, especially when you find the right weapon. The coop is playable; having latency over 75ms is pretty bad since there's so much going on. This game starts off as a rogue-like, but if you level up a bit (the leveling doesn't take too long to max out), you can put points into influencing which items/guns you want to see more of. Your ability to appraise items or guns will also be put to the test, and thankfully, Synthetik has a lot of visible numbers, so making decisions on your own is certainly possible. There are games like the Tower Defense genre, where you can have *too* many numbers that you can't realistically make a good decision about an upgrade; you have to just try it out and hope for the best. This isn't really the case for Synthetik, so each run tends to be enjoyable in discovering new things or combination thereof.

Graphics: Passing. My biggest gripe is the player character's avatar, who looks like Robocop. There are four classes in the game, which are pallete swaps of Robocop.

Sounds: Pretty good. Lots of guns, and lots of different gunfire leads to pleasing shots reverberating through my headset. The music is utterly forgettable, so I like to put on a youtube playlist on.

Story: Nonexistant. You might wonder why the bad guys say "Die, betrayer", but once you realize that's about 1/10th of the game's dialogue, you stop caring.

Bottom Line: This game is for people who like difficult games, where difficulty is fair, and your ability to click things to death isn't the only thing that matters.