A F2P Sci-Fi Looter Shooter - SYNCED Quick Review

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IS SYNCED SOLID?
Hey there! If you've been following NExT Studios (possibly due to their earlier work on Bladed Fury, Crown Trick, or Iris Fall, then you may already be in the loop about their current project, SYNCED. Synced is a bit of an odd beast, playing out like a weird hybrid between a looter shooter, a roguelite, and a Left4Dead clone. Sort of. I say this, because your initial stages (and a number thereafter), will task you with roaming a post-apocalyptic wilderness, dodging Nano-bot zombies (literally). While some harder fights can be deliberately avoided or precipitated, you also have the game occasionally flinging different flavours of zombie (Sorry, Nanos) at you when it gets too quiet.
That said, I say sort of- because while this does encapsulate some of the experience, including the whole, desperate survival part - there are also large swathes of the game simply focused on aggressively mowing down rows of enemies through tight-knit corridors, leading up to a variety of big-bad-bosses. Which, conceptually, neat - and then I noticed that I had once again stumbled into another Gacha Game. That's right, while this is a looter shooter, the crux of the rare, epic, or legendary weapons require you to pull from a Gacha to acquire them. Or to acquire copies of those weapons to further power them up. Which leads me to -
TIME PLAYED
I am at 21.2 hours. This did not, in fact, turn out to be a quick look. I binged coffee and eschewed sleep to pile away at this, and even finished the main campaign, and looped back around to the elite difficulty. And it was a painful experience. There just hits a point where your capacity to deal damage hits a brick wall, and it was taking -multiple- clips of ammo from a -epic- weapon, to put down a single enemy, in arenas full of them all swarming at you. Meanwhile, you have bosses with narrow windows of vulnerability, who also have vast swathes of health. Even in normal mode, there was one whose vulnerability was an RNG-based event tied to clearing out rooms. Which, is a -problem- when taking too long to achieve your goal in a stage causes everything to ramp up in difficulty -and- for you to eventually take damage over time. You could do -everything- right, and RNG can kill you all the same. Simply put. The further in I got, the more frustrating the experience became, especially as the few upgrades I earned didn't seem to help me make any real headway.
THE BEST BITS OF SYNCED
*Character Options. While there are a -lot- of elements that frustrate me about SYNCED, I will say this - I'm actually rather fond of the roguelike elements in the runs. Slowly acquiring a set of randomized perks that can change up what sort of weapons might benefit you is a lot of fun. Factor in that each of the game's characters has their own passives and active abilities, alongside a Nanite companion you can summon up and there are ultimately a lot of options in your toolkit.
*The Guns. While there isn't the largest roster of weapons yet- the ones that did exist within the range of rare and above were fun to tinker around with. There's a pretty wide range of effects that make all of them useful in a number of given situations, some of which come with their own unique caveats. (It would be nice if there was a rare pistol or melee weapon, but, c'est la vie).
*The larger level design. I won't lie, I really enjoyed the larger levels. Their scale provides plenty of opportunities to explore, and I generally found myself rewarded when I took the effort to do just that. Their overall design was also nice since they provide an ample amount of vantage points, and escape routes when you enter one for PVP.
*The Mobility. At your base, you are pretty good at dashing, rolling, and leaping between objects- but provided you have a companion, you can actually double jump, which allows for some pretty interesting ways to traverse the map, whether for platforming, escaping from a fight, or quickly closing the distance to a downed ally or objective.
*The Early Boss Designs. They're fun. Nuff said.
*PVP. I'm absolutely potatoes at PVP- but, SYNCED's take on it feels reminiscent of Hunt: Showdown. In the sense that you're a small squad thrown into an area loaded with hostile enemies, (and other players) - and you're doing PVE & Pvp. It works, and it's somewhat forgiving, given you get multiple chances to succeed. (Or fail).
*Cosmetics. I will never complain about monetized cosmetics. It's fine, I think - and the game still gives you options to customize your weapons skins from just playing.
THE WORST BITS OF SYNCED
*The Monetization. That said, just about -everything- costs more money in this game. Want more characters beyond the basic bunch? Buy them. Want to actually have an edge in PVE (Read: actually be able to progress or do damage?) - spend money on the Gacha. It's not just a matter of saving time. There's a rather literal difficulty cliff that imposes itself with such fierce brutality, that it might even make a whale flinch. Seriously, just take a look at -
*The enemy scaling. Even before you leave the initial story campaign, the overall durability of your enemies begins to ramp up considerably. And then you hit the next segment of the game.
While the game does have a 'power level' element you increase by equipping mods, I was always above the number it asked- And I'd invested every resource I had into improving the epic sniper rifle I'd acquired. Which, proceeded to do next to nothing, even on crits. It should not take 3 people emptying an army surplus stores inventory over a handful of seconds, while 3 hulking domesticated robo-zombies go ham - to kill a -single- basic zombie.
*The Weapon balancing. Then again, the weapon balancing at large seems fairly weird. I could take a shotgun, sneak up behind an enemy point blank, empty both barrels into a glowing weak point on their head- and they wouldn't notice it. Combat at large seemed to favour walls of bullets, rather than any individual hit.
*The Later Boss design. While there are definitely some creative encounters- there's something to be said for a major component of the later ones to be 'Flooding the area with tanky basic enemies' - while also being complete bullet sponges. Especially when these encounters frequently come at the tail end of gruelling stages you need to entirely redo if you fail. In fact, redoing -multiple- stages, for missions that have more than one, is entirely par for the course. And speaking of Tedium - (And no, I don't just mean the last third of this boss fight).
*The Grind. While I understand some people enjoy their iterative games - I go a bit crazy at the thought of playing the exact same stage over and over again to -maybe- make progress. Random pools of character mods that -might- be a useful skill, might be high enough powered, or potentially viable for a long unloved skill slot are all, random. There's no actual way of getting character mods, and power level progression except pure RNG. Likewise, progress towards any of the special weapons, will either take metric tons of grinding Pro maps for fragments of the low-tier ones, or a lot of Gacha Investment. And I mean a -lot- since to get the higher-end variants would require building or buying six copies of the same item (Which even then - a 30-minute boss fight sounds atrocious).
*The overall experience. I think it says something when I saw the bulk of what the game had to offer content-wise within the first 10 hours if we discount a few messy hours spent passed out over my keyboard, and a few painful hours spent redoing the same stage because the entire group kept getting 1 shot by the boss at the end of the base campaign. I -could- have decided to invest more time in the PVP, but it really doesn't take long for the game to feel incredibly iterative, and with only 1 PVP map, and a fairly limited pool of objectives to pull from, even that becomes fairly rote.
TL;DR? I'm not really a fan of SYNCED, and unless there are some drastic changes, especially to the PVE side of things, I don't think I'm going to be inclined to return. Especially not with the bulk of the interesting combat options for -PVE- locked behind a would-be burgeoning gambling addiction.
Anyways, If you're curious about the occasional review videos I make (For more indie stuff that is not...this),  Click Here to see them!
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