You just know that a game is either painfully tough–or simply broken–when a handful of its achievements remain unbeaten a full month after its release. In the case of Synthetik: Ultimate, both issues are the case, but you wouldn’t change it for the world.
Rogue-lite games aren’t meant to be easy, but Synthetik sits at the extreme end of the spectrum. While twin-stick contemporaries such as the superb HyperParasite offer simplistic and dependable gameplay to offset their often-brutal spikes in difficulty, Synthetik doesn’t hold your hand at all, even when you dial down the difficulty to its lowest.
At first, everything seems so straightforward. Synthetik’s story is charmingly predictable: a combination of The Terminator and The Animatrix’s Second Renaissance, creating a delightfully unoriginal take on humanity’s capitulation to the machines it created and lost control of. Hope is presented by just one, prototype cyborg, which you use to wreak havoc on these robot overlords.
Once the intro video ends, Synthetik: Ultimate’s narrative is taken into an alley and shot dead, and the game immediately makes it clear that you have a lot of hard, bewildering work ahead of you.
Synthetik’s console UI is a bit of a disaster; it’s clearly been lifted from the game’s PC interface. While it’s easy to appreciate the difficulties facing indie companies like Flow Fire Games to adapt games from keyboards to controllers, it still offers one of the most hastily deployed and unrefined menu systems I’ve seen in an Xbox One release.
Tiny buttons, a slow cursor, and often-missable menu choices mean you’ll find yourself discovering new options after hours of playing. A lack of explanations as to what certain things mean, plus hover-based tool tips that don’t work on consoles, add to the confusion. It’s just as well that the core of the game works wonderfully, even if it’s frustrating for entirely different reasons.
Synthetik: Ultimate presents with eight different rogue-lite roles, subdivided into four classes: guardian, rogue, commando, and specialist. Each one is level-based, meaning you really need to grind your favored loadout to really advance.
While there’s a lot of variety, only a few classes feel truly balanced, such as the breacher and sniper. You start with a base weapon, plus an optional second, based on character; you pick up weapons on a risk-vs-reward basis, allowing you to switch favored guns in two slots, upgrading and refining them along the way. There are also individual special abilities, which need to be used to figure out what they even do, because the game barely explains them.
However, you slowly start piecing things together amid the carnage–but you need patience, because your first few runs will be perplexing, bemusing, and ruthless.
While rogue-lite rivals like the aforementioned HyperParasite often focus on quick, room-to-room, do-or-die violence, Synthetik encourages a much more careful, considered approach to combat with its open-plan levels. It combines this with precision-demanding shooting mechanics, which can utterly fail you at the best of times, especially if you’re forced to move or dash to safety.
The real feather in Synthetik’s hardcore cap is its admirable approach to reloading. On standard difficulty, you need to eject clips and then reload them; the latter stage also employs a Gears-style perfect reload tap. Ejecting clips early–such as if you’re encroaching on multiple enemies but only have a couple of rounds left–ditches any leftover bullets, meaning you also need to manage ammo.
This may sound like a pain–and can be made slightly easier in the game’s options–but it’s one of the most satisfying mechanics in any modern rogue-lite. You soon find yourself seamlessly factoring the reload dance into your routine, like a real soldier; managing a perfect reload to escape certain death is divine. The timing animation also features on the reticle, which is as genius as it is simple.
Still, Synthetik is cruel; you’ll never escape death. Sometimes, nothing short of perfect reflexes will get you out of trouble; occasionally, a shockingly overpowered enemy will turn you into an oil slick in a matter of moments. You’ll sigh, yell, or roll your eyes, but nine times out of ten, you’ll restart from the beginning.
After hours of playing it–and only one achievement popped–I still can’t put it down. Thanks to a wealth of weapons, enemies, level designs, and special abilities, no attempt is similar to the last, and you’ll always keep learning from it, discovering new playstyles, and getting just that little bit further. Just not very far.
Disclaimer: I was provided with a copy of Synthetik: Ultimate in exchange for a fair and honest review. The Xbox Series X version was played for review purposes.
