Recent reviews by Alkaline Nights

I made it to wave 100 and then the game broke. No more microbes are spawning. I am invulnerable, and continuing wave after wave alone, with nothing but powerups and a banging soundtrack to keep me company. This was 48 hours ago. I am still playing the one round, seeking records. The bug has already been fixed. The game is good.

You can put a couple hours into this game.

After having logged in a handful of hours onto Synthetik, I can say it's a game I'd recommend. I'm still having fun with it, and there is still a huge swath of content I haven't come across.

Positives
Roguelike! - Every run feels pretty different. You dive in with one of eight subclasses (divided up between 4 main classes), start off with a pistol, and that's pretty much it. There's a tutorial, but it's honestly bad. Really bad. But then you get different enemies, different bosses, different item and weapon placements each with potential different mods. Even if you pick up the same gun as you picked up last run, chances are it isn't quite the same as the last gun either. Stats are different, modifiers are different. One rifle might print its own bullets to keep you topped off, another might slow you down to a crawl. It's pretty good stuff. The match length for me seems to be around 20 minutes, but I take my time.

Controls - The game is a shooter. And the controls are surprisingly decent. Aiming toward the head will actually produce headshots if your gun is accurate. Sometimes you just get headshots anyway because your gun is inaccurate and you get lucky. You move like you want, you have a quickly recharging dash for getting out of the way. The magazine eject, reload, and gun jamming mechanics make you actually focus on your ammunition count. Not just what you have in reserves, but how much is in the magazine. It's pretty neat accidentally ejecting a full magazine and feeling like an idiot when all that ammunition is wasted. Most of your deaths feel like your own fault.

Progression - There's a lot of stuff! Tons of guns, passive items, and active items. In game currency (data) that you use to unlock other things like more weapon variants. Gain xp and level up the subclass you used to gain more perks and strong passive effects. Spend enough time and prestige and do it all over again! Login bonuses are generous and make the game feel faster, but you don't need them to feel like you're making good progress either.

NO MICROTRANSACTIONS!

Negatives
UI - The UI in this game borders on terrible at times. There are so many effects in the game, and only half of them have tooltips. It's a slog trying to learn what some of the stats do. It's a slog trying to learn what weapon effects are. It's a slog trying to learn the controls. The main menu to mess with settings is one gigantic mess of togglable options. What makes the matters worse is that the English in the game is terrible, making the information you do get a little hard to understand at times.

Music - The music is... okay. It's mostly just background noise and doesn't add much. At times, it's just annoying. I'm the type of person that finds music to be a very important aspect of the game. So important, in fact, that if the game was just decent otherwise I'd be slapping this with a negative review.

Overall though, I'm satisfied with a twenty dollar purchase for this game. I have a general rule of thumb that if the cost of the game, divided by the time I enjoyed putting into it doesn't come out to a dollar an hour it probably wasn't worth it at all. I'll probably end up with at least double that value if not more, because I haven't really gotten bored with it yet.

There's also a multiplayer experience, and it seems like people play with it, but it seems like it's mostly a community where people know each other, and I haven't jumped into that. But if multiplayer is a selling point to you, and it's what makes you think you might enjoy this game, I'd advise against it. But if it sounds like a nice possible bonus, then that's great.