Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S2 Ep94: SYNTHETIK
74 Plays6 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they try their best to avoid shooting each other in this week's rogue-like tactical shooter!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Pre-Pandemic Life
00:00:58
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I am joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Good? Oh. Passable? All right. You're okay. It's off of just good. You know, like, I'm not sure how to elaborate and turn that into a full segment, you know? I could turn around and ask how you were doing as well. And I assume you also give me a very top-level answer. Yeah, good.
00:01:28
Speaker
Anything exciting going on? Any new stuff for you? Nope. Oh, okay. No, actually, next week, we're trying out some new D&D stuff. We were taking a break, so it's exciting to go back to that. This weekend, hanging out with friends, hanging out with you. Thanks for that distinction. I put you above them. Oh, okay. Friends, but also the esteemed Dave, as Grace does with his presence.
00:01:58
Speaker
No, it should be fun though. Play some board games. Have a good time. Gotta get that social interaction in before the corona epidemic.
COVID-19 Impact on Work and Society
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. There are some trips to work that got canceled. First, people who are going to another office in a different country. They're not kind of, maybe not. And Wuhan. They're just like, maybe we don't.
00:02:24
Speaker
We're gonna go bring some of their water back, no reason. This is a company pool, like in the most central location. Wuhan water. Everyone must attend, everyone must bathe.
Cults and Socialization Dynamics
00:02:40
Speaker
Yes, yes. It's not like a cult religion, it's like everybody needs to have the sickness but it's actually, it brings you closer to God type thing.
00:02:48
Speaker
I was thinking of the, um, the Kool-Aid like mass suicide thing, but it's not actually laced with cyanide. It just has coronavirus. I wonder, I haven't looked too much into like cults in general. Yeah. No, I have. I know the Kool-Aid thing as a, as lore. Um, cause it's been like a running joke for many years. Um, yeah, joke. Amongst our friends and family. But I mean, you see it on TV and movies and it's an understood reference. Yeah. Drinking the Kool-Aid. But.
00:03:16
Speaker
Who is so dumb to be like, I'm going to kill myself for my cult. Um, and also taking all those people with me. Do you mean like who's so dumb on the cult follower side or the cult leader? Anybody who's in the cult, I think is pretty dumb, but yeah, well, I don't understand why you would want to stop doing what you're doing currently to kill yourself for your, or I guess you want to be closer to that specific deity or whatever.
00:03:44
Speaker
A lot of it is like kind of socialization and lack of outside contextualization for actions. So like, if you're in a cult, a lot of times that's normalized for you. Like, Westboro Baptist Church, for instance. Like, for the people who have left that, they face 100% like Austra, Austra-tization? Ostracization. Ostracization, thank you. They're turning to the Ostriches.
00:04:15
Speaker
Which is a downside to leaving the colostrassization because it's ostracized. Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to say that word ostracization. Ostrich-ation. Ostrich-nation. Join our cult, ostrich-nation. But yeah, they like lose their family, they lose their friends, they lose everything like that. And then if you're in the cult, you're not seeing news about how the world perceives you.
00:04:37
Speaker
So humans are very social and things can become normal pretty easily. So that's how, you know, things like voluntarily drinking the Kool-Aid come about or having your kids drink the Kool
Listener Engagement vs Structured Content
00:04:50
Speaker
-Aid. It's, it's pretty sad. It's not always fully down to intelligence. Like sometimes people get out and they're quite intelligent. They just never saw the world that way. Right. Yeah. They weren't educated. Yeah. Edgmentated.
00:05:08
Speaker
Speaking of seeing the world that way, though. I just wait for these transitions, honestly. I'm like, I'm doing good, and then I sit pensively. Just staring at Jake. I actually kind of like the impromptu discussion of colts, like just before a game. Oh, I'll find whatever weird topic.
00:05:31
Speaker
It's kind of hilarious. I think that's what really people are here for. I wonder how many of our listeners tune in, which is a phrase, um, to the podcast just to hear whatever we talk about prior to the game. And then they drop off as soon as we get to actual planned content. This game's not interesting. I just want to know how they're doing. How do they feel about Colts these days? Speaking of Colts these days, uh, today's game,
Synthetic Game Overview
00:05:59
Speaker
for the week is synthetic. That's my transition. How'd you feel? How'd I do?
00:06:10
Speaker
I wasn't sure what you're doing with your hand. Is he going to stop or are we continuing? No, no, I'm going to go to notes. I was moving to scroll down a little bit. So, synthetic. You played first. I did. So shut up, Jake. You have a backseat on this one. Let me just mute myself real quick here.
00:06:29
Speaker
But synthetic we got from a youtuber we follow called Seth Ciantek Which is off of I think one of the Warhammer 40k it kind of is like I think so his name is not
00:06:44
Speaker
Directly one of the chaos gods if he's one of the characters, then I'm not familiar with him, but his name is so close to like Zinc or something like that like T. Well, they are sound they sound completely different. Yeah, but the chaos god Or Solanesh is another one kind of pain things like that. I Don't want to talk too much about war But yeah, he makes videos on the internet
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, and he did a pretty good representation of this because it is a isometric roguelike, uh, with guns. And initially that sounds very boring to me. Like you say you're talking about enter the guns.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, because like End of the Gudgeon is a very stylized kind of cartoony or pixelated cartoony version of it. Yeah. And it's very fun made by Devolver Digital friend of the show. And I really liked that. I obviously loved Binding of Isaac. So I was going to see how this was going to fit into that space. Yeah.
00:07:42
Speaker
And beautifully so. The way the guns all work and can be upgraded and different class, there's just so much in it that I really enjoy and the game feels nice. And it's also very punishing too. Yeah, which you love. Which I feel is I like being punished. I'm here for the pain. It adds a little bit of challenge and you have to get used to it.
00:08:07
Speaker
So, if you do progressive, be like, ah, that was skill, parentheses, RNG for me.
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's from a presentation standpoint, it's got this 80s sort of synth dystopic future sort of vibe for it. So I have a line here that I'm going to read and pretend that I didn't just read it. The year is 1985 and once again the threat of AI looms over the horizon. That's basically the plot for the game.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah. You're a android, right? Yeah. It's like with the last human consciousness or something like that. And you're going and fighting these other robots and androids. In 1985. In 1985, specifically. Past future in 1985. Your character shouts that throughout the whole game. It's 1985. It's 1985. Occasionally he'll pepper in a party like it in there.
00:09:05
Speaker
Um, but yeah, it's got this, uh, I wouldn't in any way necessarily equate it with cyberpunk because it's not like that at all, but that, um, the way that we would perceive a dystopic future run by machines you're fighting, you know, out in the streets. It's, it's kind of like a part Mad Max part Robo cup, probably leaning closer to Robo cup.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah. It's also got kind of like a kick of those old arcade games where you're just kind of like running around in an area. I'm trying to think of like, I don't know if it was talking about like TMNT turtles and time type thing. Let's kind of like, get them upside scroller. Yeah.
00:09:46
Speaker
some of that side scroller a little bit of the Those games where you'd like fly ship and you're like destroying ground and placements It's got that kind of feel where you're just making progress level by level Through these randomly generated like levels just fighting a bunch of guys the Feel for it feels like really arcadey moment to moment and it's not that complicated. I
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah. You, you walk around and you're not super fast by default and you have a dash to kind of zip through the reposition quickly. Um, and you have a gun and usually you're trying to guns me some variety of pistol. This is America. As you progress on locks, you can make more choices on your starting loadout. But by default, you'll have a pretty basic gun. You'll have a class specific item.
00:10:41
Speaker
Oh yeah. And there's a lot of classes we're going to get into the list. Eight, right? Yeah. So you have a class specific item, you'll have some other utility item, and then you have up to two passes. Yeah.
00:10:55
Speaker
The level of customization you get is really dope. Oh yeah. But the one thing that makes me sad is certain, uh, passives are specific to the class. So like I love transmute from the engineer. Yeah. Well, I can sell off an item I have and it'll reroll into something better, but different. But then there's also, um, headhunter. Yes. From the sniper class. I think like both the assassin and sniper get that one.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah, they kind of have like, they're grouped. So two of the classes will pair together. So like, riot, guard, right, right, right. And like, can we share
00:11:39
Speaker
Breacher yeah, that's correct. They'll have like some similar abilities to Garth Ennis book that are shared Sniper and assassin have some shared abilities and also their unique stuff Raider honey rave the book raider and heavy gunner share some stuff and then engineer and demolisher Yeah So I think I initially started out with one of the first two mm-hmm
00:12:04
Speaker
Immediately was like this is not for me. You wouldn't like single-player when you started, right? Yeah, I was just checking it out initially. Yeah, and then I mentioned it to you and Mike I said hey, we should probably try some co-op at a point and it's actually really fun Mike responded to you Relatively quickly I presume. Well, here's the thing. I showed him Seth's video. Yeah, he's like, I don't know. It seems all right. Uh-huh
00:12:27
Speaker
And then it's like, five days later, he's playing as like, yeah, it's fucking good. So we've been doing some co-op and we probably will continue to do some co-op because it's just, it's really fun. Yeah. Cause we can make calls like, Hey, I gotta reload. So one person can cover somebody else and we'll kind of split weapons and upgrades.
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, it's worth mentioning that reloading in this
Co-op Experience in Synthetic
00:12:49
Speaker
game is unique compared to the way it works in shooters. It starts off like a huge dog shit pain in the ass because you have to empty your whole clip. So if you still have bullets, they're gone. And when you reload, you have to wait for the bar to fill back up or until it hits a certain spot, you can active reload again and it will reload your clip a little bit quicker.
00:13:14
Speaker
There is a button to just drop the clip too. It's just a different button. No, it's the same thing. I had two buttons. I had one button to drop clip and then another button to do a reload. That's how everybody has it.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I was saying. Oh, I thought you were saying you had to shoot all of the shots before you dropped the clip. Yeah. It's whenever you are like emptying, you have to reload fully. You have to empty your clip and reload. So any unshot bullets will be lost. Yes. You like, you straight up dropped the clip. I thought by emptying your clip, you're like fire off into the desert. Poor wording on my part. Also, fuck you, the English language. We're going to switch to espanol.
00:13:56
Speaker
Hola. Yo solamente. Huego el gato es pantalones. Rudimentary Spanish. Igualmente. So on top of that reloading, cause if you don't manage your clip and you're in a firefight, you're like, fuck.
00:14:16
Speaker
Which happens to me a lot, so I will usually dash behind and then start ejecting my clip and try and reload. So I have a bit of buffer time before enemies. Cause like once they see you, they're like, fuck that guy over there. Yeah. And they will usually follow you and they're smart enough to usually find where you are unless you really scoot away very quickly.
00:14:35
Speaker
It has some interesting like impacts on the pacing for sure you mentioned like going into cover. We've covered other games that are Kind of similar in some ways like we played we talked we had an episode on Rubiner Which is very momentum based the reloading mechanic and the micro requires kind of forces you to slow down especially if you're using certain weapons that are more like you have to reload a lot or Something else is going on. Yeah, where cover starts to matter
00:15:03
Speaker
There are classes that mitigate it a little bit, a little more like melee, aggressive, but other ones like the sniper, like you have to respect the reload mechanic because 50% of the time you're just standing there putting another clip in your gun, you know?
00:15:20
Speaker
Yeah, it can be really brutal. And also the levels are always randomly generated, which is a good part of a roguelike. But it's not set in the way like binding of Isaac has a pool of randomly selected things for a certain floor. This is completely randomized. Now, maybe there are some overlaps that I haven't seen yet.
00:15:43
Speaker
But it always feels fresh and new, and I'm not like, oh, this is this room. And the enemy layout will be different. It'll also be different pickups for you to get. Either small trinkets that can add up into an actual item, or you'll have an item drop, an ammo box, weapon drop. Yeah, weapon crate or something like that. There's a lot of
00:16:06
Speaker
effort and like detail put into the core gameplay. It's really noticeable. You're talking about like the drops where like I couldn't not literally at all remember a single floor.
00:16:20
Speaker
of the game that I played through where I was like, this is a memorable floor. But they spend so much time on that core loop. We've talked about the core gameplay loop. Core loop? What's that? Yeah, core gameplay loop, or what you're actually doing moment to moment. What are your drives and goals? What is the reason you're playing the game right now? What's your next objective?
00:16:43
Speaker
that it feels really, really tight. Like they've just packed the content in there in such a way that I bring this up every episode now, but I'm not like super hot on roguelikes. But the time I did put in the game, I enjoyed.
00:17:01
Speaker
And yeah, well we can talk about some of the actual mechanics there So do you always get a weapon crate on the first level or it's not guaranteed It seems like we missed one like we definitely went through a level. It's
Weapon Customization in Synthetic
00:17:15
Speaker
like we do we both have pistols still. Yep So I think at least by the second floor you're guaranteed a weapon crate drop. Mm-hmm
00:17:22
Speaker
which will almost arguably always be better than your default weapon. Yeah. On a run that I had tonight, the first weapon crate I got was a divine weapon. I was like, oh, hello. What's the what's the special effect for divine weapons? So I think divine is just like a higher variance drop. There's kind of better stats overall. But as a gun that I'd seen before, it just performed very nicely.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah. So the stats because they are guns are going to be like damage, fire rate, recoil, spread. And also as you are upgrading guns through like upgrade kits or other means, you can modify those stats and possibly have things like, oh, there'd be a chance that I won't consume a bullet when I fire. There'd be maybe some bonus for active reloading.
00:18:10
Speaker
Yeah. And other stuff like that. Or you always deal some bonus effects for the last round in the chamber. Yeah. And if you have a single shot sniper. Yeah, like bolt action or something. You can put out some damage. Yeah. Or something that like blows this whole clip at once. You can do a lot of modifications to augment your play style, depending on what you're going for.
00:18:34
Speaker
It actually has a lot of complexity to the weapon system. The closest corollary I can think of is Borderlands, probably, and the variety of weapons. But in Borderlands, every gun, unless it was unique, was randomly generated, and they just determined some attributes based off of the manufacturer.
00:18:57
Speaker
This one it seems like there's a core set of guns And like these are all the gun types the game has and then it randomly determines the manufacturer on a roll And then that modifies the gun so one gun Like in incest video for instance, there's the the hyper burst Variant of like an assault rifle and you fire. Oh, yeah. Yeah at a time. That's where you can have those variants as well. Oh
00:19:23
Speaker
And like somebody else might get the same gun, but it might have full auto, for instance. Um, so you can get some, a lot of variation off of the same types of weaponry. I think we both got a similar gun and like, um, back to back, it was like Val or something, uh, I believe was the name of it. Um, but mine was like single fire, I think, and yours was more rapid fire. Um,
00:19:47
Speaker
And you're like, oh, Dave, you got the better gun, clearly. I did, but the one downside of just pouring out bullets is as you fire, your gun will build up heat, which depending on the type of gun and its ammo type and how fast you're firing, that rate may grow or change at different paces.
00:20:07
Speaker
But if your gun overheats, you're essentially holding like a molten gun and it starts like to chip into your health very noticeably. So you have to switch to another gun or just manage that. But there are a lot of times there'll be in a firefight and I'll have this really cool gun. I'll forget how fast it overheats because of how powerful it is and I'll be like,
00:20:30
Speaker
Die, die, and then I die. Not from being shot, but because my gun killed me. Right. You have a Dark Souls bonfire in your hands. I'll respawn here. Interesting. But it just feels really good to have those firefights or small engagements. Mm-hmm. Because like what I'm doing, we did kill up a little bit. Yeah. Had more practice with Mike, but we like, we'll go through and we'll kind of like, like a SWAT team, kind of be like, we're going to clear this area.
00:20:59
Speaker
It's not like we're going corner to corner being like clear next. Yeah, I mean you kind of play like cinema you try and go shoot them and not be hit by them Yeah, it just feels too good to go squad deep on that
00:21:11
Speaker
And you can have those tactics, like the first class I played was Sniper, and the default starting, like, equipable for Sniper is like a flash grenade. So you can just be like, oh, okay, we're gonna move it just a little bit slower, there's a big group ahead, we'll drop the flash grenade, they'll be disoriented, we can follow up, take them out, stuff like that.
00:21:33
Speaker
On later subsequent playthroughs. I didn't have anywhere near that kind of tactical Approach because I played a class that forced me to like run up and grab dog tags Manda commando and I got a lot of friendly fire because I continually put myself between where the opponent was and where Dave was and
00:21:55
Speaker
That's not on Dave, that's me intersecting this line. James is going full Mr. President when he did not intend to. The thing is though like some of those mechanics that the glasses have incentivize it so heavily like for commando whenever you get dog tags it recharges your shield.
00:22:13
Speaker
So you can kind of mitigate friendly fire by just being like, yeah, we'll take you and the enemy as long as I'm getting dog tags. So I'm actually mid command to run right now. And then you showed up. Thanks. But I was trying out some of the other classes because mainly I've been maining the engineer who by default has a turret buddy he can summon. I'm like.
00:22:34
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, cuz I can drop that fuck off behind the wall reload or just Mitigate damage recollect my thoughts and then go back in and it can also just take away some of the aggro But also deal out a decent amount of damage
00:22:49
Speaker
It's just, you'd have to keep it alive. Now by default, you do have an item to overclock your summons. So I could be like, oh, I would full heal him and he would do more damage. But I sell that item immediately because I have transmutate on and I want to roll for like some cursed item.
00:23:09
Speaker
Yeah. So you play, you're playing it like it's Isaac with like the D six you're playing for the RNG and in a game, in a road, like broken passes, please, why wouldn't you, you know, like you're going to want to try for the, for the build and engineers. Definitely the class for that. I don't know if you saw in the video or not, but Seth was level 400 on engineer. What?
Discussion on Game Classes and Strategies
00:23:28
Speaker
Yeah. It's very, it's very clear where his time was spent. Um, I can't really, can't really argue with it. It looked like it was a lot of fun.
00:23:39
Speaker
So one thing that's fun is, um, and that sound means it's time for intermission where we talk about whatever we'd like to talk about. And if you'd like, this is a great opportunity to stretch your legs. They go urinate or grab a snack. That's what people call it.
00:24:01
Speaker
Grabbing a snack? You go grab a snack out back, if you know what I mean. You peed on my shed. Grabbing a snack. Sorry, you don't know the lingo. I told you. Speaking of grabbing a snack, this week in free games, there's not much on Epic Games Story. I looked at it. Games didn't seem super interesting to me. I don't remember what they were called.
00:24:25
Speaker
So instead, Jake, I like how you're making a biased choice, you know, assuming what other people's tastes and interests are. Right. Well, let's see the problem. You can test. My problem is, or my concern is if we pick EGS every week, then they're not going to have any incentive to like sponsor us because we're already always going to them. Right. So we got to like push their competitors a little bit.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, we definitely want to remain open to all possible sponsors. Give us that 10 cent money. So instead, Twitch, Amazon Prime-ish thing for people who have Prime, a bunch of free games. There's Bomber Crew, which is a single-player bomber simulation game.
00:25:09
Speaker
Is that like Bomberman or is that more of you're flying by and you don't really see the villagers at that height, but It's like it's Like a fighter bomber simulation. So you like get your crew Pick them out from like training and stuff like that. They have different perks and things and then they crew your your bomber
00:25:31
Speaker
It's literally what it is. I saw the print. I saw the, um, the setup for this game. I was like, this has to be multiplayer. It's like going to have different people in the ship and stuff like that. Right. It's like sort of like, um, I think it's like guns of Icarus or something like that. It's like a multiplayer, uh, water ship game.
00:25:48
Speaker
But no, this is a single player. Icarus would be the flying steampunk ships. That's what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking of Sea of Thieves. Sea of Thieves. That's literally it. Yeah, it was my brain. Sadly, I know all of these games. Sid Meier's Pirates. No, that's not it. No. That's next week's episode. Not actually. But yeah, free game, bomber crew. Check it out. These are all also $15 on Steam if you want to buy them on Steam instead.
00:26:14
Speaker
Uh, whispers of the machine, which is a sci-fi point and click adventure game. If you like to both point and click, I assume this is more in the style of like older monkey Island type point and click. Yeah. It's kind of like that, but based off of what I saw from the trailer, a lot of it was like kind of like interpersonal relationships and identity questions and things like that. There was, there was some cool stuff in it.
00:26:39
Speaker
or what it looked like at least I don't play these games obviously we're beyond that we don't play games but yeah there's that one there's mugsters which is a local co-op physics puzzle-ish game which was the only one I think it was mostly positive on Steam everything else was very positive
00:27:01
Speaker
Um, all right. Hard, hard recommendation. Yeah. And then, uh, epic story, not epic story or epic Mickey completely different typing Chronicles, uh, which is a typing game.
00:27:13
Speaker
Kind of like Typing of the Dead or whatever it was called. Or Bookworm Adventures, but whatever. Yeah, Bookworm Adventures Deluxe, obviously. And I think this one's actually on here because the next game was announced at PAX, I'm pretty sure. Interesting that a typing game would have that much draw and allure to it to be announced at a gaming convention. Yeah, well, they can't stop you. That's the thing. You announce your game around PAX and it'll get picked up.
00:27:40
Speaker
Um, which might've been the, the strat here, but, uh, the, the, I dunno, what's, what's this last game? So far this list seems mediocre. So let's spice up with, uh, fury. Holy shit. With an eye. Yeah. Uh, this is one of those games I said I would buy for people, but now I don't have to. You can download it for free. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, either Google it or listen to our previous episode where we filleted for about an hour. It's still to this day, probably my favorite episode.
00:28:10
Speaker
And yeah, there are a lot of edits. Thank you for that. The audio quality probably wasn't as great overall. Oh, it's garbage. It's dog shit. It's pretty bad. We should do re-records. Oh, man. For our Patreon subscribers. Also join our Patreon. Also, start a Patreon for us.
00:28:34
Speaker
like I mentioned there's cursed items in the game and items are either passive effects you have on like your quick bar slot or ones you can activate.
Challenges and Enemy Diversity in Synthetic
00:28:43
Speaker
Both are really fun and it has like a wide range of utility for out all items but
00:28:49
Speaker
The one thing I really liked was a passive that essentially was always bleeding out my health over time. Yeah. Like Soul Edge. Um, but if I ever hit enemies, I got like substantial life steal. Yeah. Now there's also an upgrade station, uh, specifically for items support a lot of money into that. I'm like, I want to be a fucking God. Yeah. And then I just watch my health drain at such a rate. I'm like, Jake, we gotta go quick. We gotta go fast.
00:29:15
Speaker
So we had three levels of like trying to run and gun. And then I was like, wait, I can just sell this item. It's killing me. So I did. And I was like, oh, I'm not dying anymore. Yeah. You talked like a little bit about the starter items for the classes. Yeah. That's like some meta progression that goes into this.
00:29:32
Speaker
There actually is a starter item for engineer I saw that caps out the negative health effects of anything that would drain on you. Status effects that drain your health at 25% of your maximum health. So you can't kill yourself then and your health will only go so low and then you can just vampire your way back up.
00:29:51
Speaker
Interesting. There's a surprising number of viable builds and approaches, given how the items can play around. For a game that's pretty much entirely about shooting enemies that are largely samey, some fixed emplacements. Like turret enemies. Yeah. They might shoot mortars or try and line up a shot to do artillery.
00:30:17
Speaker
But it's that same gameplay. You can go through a couple playthroughs and have seen most of the enemy types. But there's so much variety in the builds or how a run could go that that's kind of the incentive to keep playing.
00:30:32
Speaker
Yeah. I will oftentimes change up my play style based on what I'm getting. I'd be like, okay, I'm not going to have a lot of damage early. Let's tank up. Yeah. Let's go for some regen and I'll get like a healing crystal and something else. It'd be like nice. And I'll try and roll with that. And then everything else I built off of that will be with that in mind. Yeah. Like I played, was it the, I don't know if it was the commando that had this STEM or maybe it was like the other class.
00:30:59
Speaker
I think commando was stem. I believe it was commando, yeah. It was definitely, yeah. I think they're called raider actually.
00:31:06
Speaker
Raiders, one of the blue ones. Yeah. I don't know. Uh, but yeah. Uh, STEM was interesting cause I could, uh, is literally like Starcraft's thing. You take some damage immediately and then you heal yourself, um, after the damage runs out. Um, but well, actually that's not how vanilla Starcraft works. That's how co-op Starcraft works. You can get upgraded STEM anyways. I digress.
00:31:31
Speaker
But you also heal your ally. So if you have shared buffs, team buffs, where it's like, oh, we're going to amp healing effects, things like that, you could play a more kind of supporty role in the party. Be like, all right, we're going to balance some of these things out. Or you could go assassin and intersect that line between Dave's line of fire and the opponent trying to get some of that backstabbed sneak attack damage, fully knowing that you won't get dog tags to heal this stuff.
00:32:02
Speaker
I recommend that that form of gameplay Honestly, a lot of the classes outside of I'm not liking the blue classes, which are the That's like the right shield and the right shield and the raider. Yeah, they just seem very slow paced Not as much my thing. Yeah, very defensive though Like I didn't play the right shield one but I was looking at some of their passes and they have a whole lot of like
00:32:28
Speaker
Oh, now your, your cover has like increased damage absorption or last longer. Here's a bunch of healing. Um, your shield itself is just armor. There's like significant differences in play style, uh, across a lot of these classes.
00:32:46
Speaker
Yeah. Mike was showing me a video of him doing heavy gunner. He got some good gun and they have a clasp item to kind of like overclock their gun or something. Hey, it was just up the first boss and it's, it was Swiss cheese. Yeah. Hot wet Swiss cheese on a summer's day on the asphalt. It just cut right through them. Yeah. It was a very short video.
00:33:14
Speaker
I was watching somebody fight the last defender, the final boss, and it just absolutely obliterated the guy. It might've been heavy gunner, actually. It was like 10 seconds or something really clear, like insane amounts of DPS. You can get broken in that. That's the point of any rogue like it was to get broken. Get broker die trying. Yeah. Get broker break.
00:33:43
Speaker
Financially also where I'm at, but The thing is it's a like any good rogue like it has a lot of good risk reward Yeah, so you might get a passive for head is percent chance for you to like shoot rockets out
00:33:57
Speaker
to deal extra damage to enemies and you're like, wow, suck with a fucking pistol right now. It's really going to boost my damage output. But then you kind of like peek out from behind a wall and the missile spread a little bit. And now you've done a fourth of your health and damage because you were next to a wall when you shot a rocket. Yeah. I've, I've, or bullet and bounce ricochet. Yeah. I refuse to pick up ricochet ever. Cause I'm like, I'm going to kill me or I'm going to kill somebody who I'm playing with too risky.
00:34:26
Speaker
And there is like, you can respawn in co-op, but you take like a penalty every time you do. The penalty being cursed flesh. Yeah. So you will have less shields overall. And shields are the regenerable parts of health. I'm not sure if you take a max health hit as well.
00:34:47
Speaker
It's definitely shields.
Difficulty Scaling and Player Adaptation
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah, because it was a significant number of shields. I think it's 10% health or something like that. So basically, you come back weaker, but then you're also more susceptible to status effects and damage. Just flat out. It's like, hey, 10% bonus, too. If you get set on fire, peace. And you're like, that sucks. So curse flash, you don't also only get when you die. You can also get it from a cursed item chest or a cursed weapon chest.
00:35:15
Speaker
or you can go to one of the machine god altars and maybe pay for a curse of flesh to get some bonus out of it. Yeah. It's kind of the, uh, the like devil's deal option of the game. Now, cursed flesh is separate from terror level. Terror level is basically when the game, similar to in Left 4 Dead, if you're doing really well, the game AI will be like,
00:35:41
Speaker
All right, fuck these kids and we'll make things more difficult and adjust to you. So if you're running through something, it'd be like, okay, you can handle it and it will up the difficulty. Yeah. And this can also happen from events or other things going on. The AI director. Yeah. Terra level is also goes up. If Terra blade gets a shadow blade and a day gone and has his ultimate, you're like, okay, I know what's going on.
00:36:10
Speaker
I'm gonna hide behind this entry. That's for the Dota fans. I did so much research for this joke. Wait a sec. Yeah. So he's gonna hit them with a lot of damage. Yeah. And then he has his ultimate, which allows him to swap health pools with somebody. Yeah. So the strat, the Dagon's not strictly
00:36:36
Speaker
Necessary, but it makes it more reliable. The strategy is you actually take a bunch of damage from neutrals. So your health goes really low. Okay. That's the whole precursor that I missed of like you walk in with no health. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So as a tieback.
00:36:56
Speaker
So DBZ Buddha guy. Okay. This is a time back. Yeah. I'm not sure if he's still playable character in these games. I'm sure he is, but he's shitty. One of the friezes fighting five was a Captain Ginyu. Okay.
00:37:13
Speaker
And basically his one special was his body swap. Which is something that happened in the anime, so they put it as an ability here. But basically, you get your ass kicked for a lot of things, you land this one move, and then you just punch him like twice. Oh that's dumb.
00:37:29
Speaker
But the thing is, if anybody's ever playing Captain Ginyu, as soon as you got beaten down, people would be like, mmm, suspicious. They're like waiting for like a grab animation or something. Oh, man. The comebacks.
00:37:46
Speaker
So yeah, this game has a devil deal like things in the form of the machine.
Quest System and Rewards in Synthetic
00:37:51
Speaker
Machine God, Omnissiah. There's also quests you could get from the machine. Sometimes it would be like a defense sort of quest where you have to run out and kill a bunch of enemies that have been spawned on the map for a reward.
00:38:06
Speaker
A lot of times it was an upgrade kit for me. The reward is usually an upgrade kit or some type of overall body passive bonus. You might be like, oh, I have better scavenging for finding ammo. I have health regen. I have a crit bonus. I move faster. Those types of upgrades.
00:38:24
Speaker
How much do you find those, do you find yourself like paying much attention to those stats? I didn't like when I was playing it, but in doing a little bit of research for this, I saw that like engineer takes a base 20% attribute penalty. Like they are just more dependent on their actives and their items. Interesting. Yeah. Well, a lot of their stuff does synergize with items. So that would, I guess, seem fair.
00:38:46
Speaker
Yeah. And why I keep missing my shots, but... You miss 100% of the shots. That's what the turret's for. No, it's... Use the gun. I don't keep an active eye on it. There will be some effects on the top right corner of your screen, just like, hey, this is an active thing. Yeah.
00:39:08
Speaker
Which is good if you ask me like a timed item. So occasionally you may have to do a devil deal for like a chest and you will get an insanely powerful cursed weapon that poops damage and is very scary and badass. But it might only last for two minutes. And you have two minutes to use it.
00:39:27
Speaker
Don't know if mine are all of the timed weapons cursed or some of them just just timed some can just be times Okay, some of them might be like event-based. Gotcha Like one of the missions you can get is like hey you got to kill 30 guys Then it gives you a gun with 160 bullets. You're like cool and you just mow things down
00:39:43
Speaker
yeah i had a i had one timed weapon in the form of a single shot sniper rifle that just did absolutely absurd damage just one hit killed everything penetrated uh which is great um nothing like some good penetration
00:40:00
Speaker
Uh, but I had to reload between every single shot. So I'd like pop out, be like, definitely dead. All right, Dave, do your work behind cover field, stripping the gun and rebuilding it. Um, I had it for like a minute or something, but I was like, man, I wish I could hold onto this.
00:40:17
Speaker
The thing is it's, the guns in the game are really cool because you do have that much variation, but also some just feel really good or have crazy fun effects.
Weapon Sharing and Core Gameplay Mastery
00:40:27
Speaker
Like the number of times that I've been playing with Mike, we've stopped to be like, Hey, check this out. And like, we'll stop what we're doing. We'll fire off the gun and be like, whoa. And then we're like, we'll give the gun to the other person. Like now you shoot it. Or like Michael sent me a video being like, this gun's fucking bad-ass and it shoots nukes. And I was like, yup.
00:40:48
Speaker
So all that stuff is just really Something we didn't know when we were playing in our co-op session was that you can actually just drop guns So I did find myself at one point basically like hoarding all the weaponry because I kept walking up to weapon crates like well Dave was like I've got like a Like squirt gun and a nerf blaster as a backup And I'm just here with like chain guns and like a rocket launcher and all the stuff whatever
00:41:15
Speaker
But yeah, there's a, there's a drop gun weapon, uh, button so you can just be like, Hey, communism. You use it. Hand me downs. Yeah. Yeah. Um, which is necessary if one person is literally getting every weapon. I'm not good.
00:41:34
Speaker
The game also has some Mimi weapons. Like they have Yoko's rifle from Gurren Lagann. Landon if you're listening. You're like the only person who needs a care. There also is like a 360 no scope gun. Yeah. Where if you literally spin around and then shoot you get like a bonus to damage or something.
00:41:54
Speaker
Yeah, the reticule gets way smaller after the 360. That's like the only way you can land a shot. Because usually flailing the gun around a bunch or running will expand your reticule a lot. The game wants you to be stationary when you're taking shots with a lot of weapon types. Some of them don't matter. Shotguns, you're going to run at them and shoot.
00:42:18
Speaker
But otherwise it wants you to be kind of tactical about it And it's interesting like we talked about it with a reloading but that that pacing difference The fact that they strike a balance is kind of impressive Yeah, but as you progress through the game depending if you're putting a lot of points into
00:42:36
Speaker
faster fire rate or less spread on guns. You can kind of just get decently overpowered with a gun, put a lot of upgrades into it, and just run around and mow down things. You might not need to take cover. Yeah. You make it to the end of the game and your gun's just like, I've done it, I've accomplished it, and it unequips your hands.
00:43:03
Speaker
I feel like I got some gun or passive where, like let's say I take three shots. It would passively reload. Oh yeah. Bullets out of thin air. It's not taking from like the ammo bank. Yeah. It's just giving me ammo back. And I was like, this is nice. You should, if you appreciate that, you should just play more engineer. Because engineers 20 unlock is anytime you're not firing your gun, it's regenerating ammo.
00:43:31
Speaker
All right, so I'm playing engineer past level 20. That's what that is. Gotcha. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. I thought you were like 15. So I was like, get hyped. Oh, Jake, I'm a pro engineer player now. I'm glad you're not 15.
00:43:46
Speaker
Uh, yeah, no, it's, it's got some, some definitely solid gameplay, uh, core loop. The music's awesome. Like you guys have already heard one of the tracks. I don't know which one, uh, but do it in post. Yeah, and do it in post. I mean, I will. That's, that's, that's how the podcast works. But you guys heard like, uh, one of the intro tracks, um, totally just recommend checking out the OST if you like that.
00:44:10
Speaker
Uh, it's like all OSTs just on YouTube and just great synth, 80, techno, 80s, techno nonsense. Super
Sustained Interest and Meta Progression
00:44:23
Speaker
good. Yeah. It's got some nice synth vibes going on there.
00:44:28
Speaker
Um, but like any good rogue, like I've already put X amount of hours into it and I still have the desire to play. And I don't feel like I've burned out on runs. Yeah. Like I spent enough time on Isaac where I'm like, okay, I know what this item is. I know what it does. I know how I'm going to play it now. And it's become very rote and almost memorized to a degree, very automatic murder. She wrote.
00:44:53
Speaker
Why'd she write? But it's just, it's felt super good to play. I want to keep doing more co-op with Jake and Mike. I'd love to do it with both, but it's a, it's a max of two people at a time. Right. But a friendly fire does exist. That is, I cannot emphasize that enough. That is a hundred percent true. Half of the times I was blown up by a rocket launcher, it was myself.
00:45:22
Speaker
There was a time that I had a bouncing bullets on. It was just part of the gun. Killed Jake. Yeah. There was the time I'm thinking of in particular, you like had an album because you oftentimes will swap between weapons rather than doing the combat reload, given that it can take some time to reload. And if you're not in cover, then you're just standing there getting shot. So it's better.
00:45:46
Speaker
It's like that call of duty pop-up or whatever from like cod four. It's like, it's faster to switch to your sidearm than like reload your weapon or whatever. Like, yeah, it's that. I mean, depending what perks you have put on. Sure. Right. I think everybody had like fast hands and scavenger and stuff.
00:46:03
Speaker
Fast hands of Kimbo boy. Oh my gosh. But, yeah, so he swapped out to his his secondary weapon to fire and it was the full on shotgun or not shotgun, the rocket launcher. And I was already in melee like step and I have my commando knife. I'm just like, I died to an explosion. They're just putting away the rocket launch. Hands are fast goes away. Hands up for that knife. I don't know what happened. It's just me and my fists.
00:46:33
Speaker
No, it's got some very solid gameplay. I don't know if it's still on sale, probably not. Probably not. Kim and I are just not more than 20 bucks. Yeah. It's relatively inexpensive.
00:46:47
Speaker
It has a global chat, I think, when you're playing the game. Yeah. It's one of those games you can play in single player and still see people talking online all the time. Yeah. And every time I check messages, which is infrequent, but it is there, so I do see it. People are usually talking about guns, builds, passes. Yeah. Did Seth get you guys here as well? That type of stuff.
00:47:12
Speaker
Apparently after his video, uh, went up, um, chat was just full of, Hey, Hey people, Hey, Hey people, Hey people. That's all it was. And then the developers would at least stay an update where the title was, Hey, Hey people. It was pretty funny. I'm glad it's a cool community. Yeah.
00:47:33
Speaker
It's nice to have some pillars of moral content, upstanding individuals you'd want to bring home. You guys can't hear me shaking my head. Vigorous shaking. I like Seth as a YouTuber, but would not say is moral. 70% of his videos are watchable. At work.
00:48:01
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you can also just like host public lobbies and have people join as well. Um, because I accidentally, accidentally joined somebody else's lobby. Um, this isn't, this isn't the meme name I was meant to join. Yeah. When you only have like a two player cap on how many people can join in a lobby, it's probably relatively rare that you'd like join a lobby and the other person was expecting you to be there. It's not like a Diablo or something where people are joining to trade items.
00:48:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's a solid game though. Yeah. I definitely want to unlock more characters and items. Something I want to talk about before we were done. Yeah. I complain about meta progression in Roguelikes a lot. I feel like there's not enough of it. There's a stupid amount of meta progression in whatever the name of this game is, synthetic.
00:48:56
Speaker
like some other games it's like oh you unlock different classes you can play as but you always go back to zero and synthetic as you're leveling up your class your class is just getting better the game is just giving you more things and upgrades and passives and choices
00:49:14
Speaker
Um, there's a full research system, which has like probably like 20 upgrades or so, uh, where you can spend currency you get by like completing runs. Um, and they all just make the game easier. That's all, that's all it is. Um, which I am so much a fan of. This is like the mirror in Hades. Um, where it's just, we made you better go out there and fight some more.
00:49:41
Speaker
Yeah. And they also recently added things where you can upgrade a weapon specifically with a different type of currency, but each upgrade has a different variant that you can pick. So it's like three different play styles per weapon now. Gotcha. Nice. But I do like when games have that. Cause as I always go back to saying, I hate when a game's like, this is how you play the game. Go do the thing. Yeah. Now certain things are designed for that and can be like linear as far as
00:50:09
Speaker
gameplay approach like fury. It's a good example of that. You can't play it differently than me. It's the game. It's what it is. Yeah. But when you are given options, the fact that those options are not restricted always feels really good. Yeah. Cause I'm very much a.
00:50:27
Speaker
linear approach to how I do my things. I'll be like, oh, we'll all get all the possible damage passes that I can or health regen passes that I can. And I like to roll or lean on the RNG when possible.
00:50:43
Speaker
The game definitely like incentivizes a bit of variety though, cause there's, there's a challenge on unlock for every class, which is beat the final, the final defender, last defender, um, at a certain difficulty level, 140%. Um, and if you do that, you get a bonus that applies to everyone, everyone that you play. So like, it might just be 3.5 health region a second or something like that. It's just pretty nice. Yeah.
00:51:12
Speaker
It's just there's no health regen by default by the way. Yeah that you have to find health packs Um instance health droppables have a have a friend with stem. That's what I recommend Thankfully the healing items are always a party shared. Mm-hmm. I also shared the um What was it was it wasn't throwing knives? But the explosion fan of man of knives. Thank you. Yeah
00:51:37
Speaker
so jay picked up a really cool passive that i wanted to sell immediately but he kept it for a floor or two where if he takes damage there's a percent chance that he won't shoot knives in an aoe around him now when we're both behind cover but jake's peeking out to take shots and get shot
00:51:53
Speaker
I eat knives in the face. It's kind of funny. We're both you can just imagine us there behind the cement wall. And I'm just like, I'm a little beat up. How are you doing, Dave? Dave's like, I'm fine. And then the knives explode. And he's like, I'm not doing so good. I'm going to hide behind a different wall. It's great, though.
00:52:13
Speaker
Yeah, I'm still discovering like some really fun cursed or other items. Like there's one where you can turn it on and for the duration, uh, your gun does not consume ammunition. Oh geez. I repeat does not consume ammunition. So you can just full on poop out bullets. Yeah. And like clear a whole room of people or more specifically, pretty, be pretty useful in a boss fight where you just need to pepper out the damage.
00:52:41
Speaker
Yeah. That would be ridiculous for certain weapons explosive and stuff like that. And you're like, well, this item's really good, but the cooldown seems kind of long. The duration's like four seconds. I might sell it for something else.
00:52:56
Speaker
hold on but wait there's more if you find an upgrade station you can pump money into that to make it better yeah that's another thing like if i as i was initially playing the engineer i'm like oh turrets op right so i'd pump everything into turret
00:53:14
Speaker
So I'd have like a level nine turret. It has one of those, I am an elite enemy symbols on it. And it just mows people down. I would throw that in boss fights and then it would expire. And then I'd be like, Oof.
00:53:33
Speaker
turret makes it to the end of the game and then unequips you it's like i've made it just a pile of guns and turrets at the end is like you were just a vessel ah man the observant listener may have heard that uh i mentioned 140 difficulty for the challenge the unlocks per class uh and that's a weird number to have like for difficulty and the reason it is
00:53:58
Speaker
The way it is it's because this game has this kind of like a bastion super giant like difficulty system where you can toggle different effects or modifiers on in order to increase the difficulty, but give yourself some other advantages in the form of maybe like better loot or I don't know there's other stuff in there, but
00:54:21
Speaker
Like manual the reloading mechanic that's something you can toggle on and off Yep, also another mechanic that we did not mention, but it's pretty important is jamming. That's true. Yeah
00:54:33
Speaker
So there are times randomly where your gun can just jam. Meaning that you can't shoot until you press R six times. And you think that's a pain in the ass? It is. But you get used to it very quickly. The way I got used to it is by switching my weapon. I was just like, I'll come back to you when I don't have an enemy shooting me in the face.
00:54:56
Speaker
Yeah, it is nice. I'm bad at that. I'll usually try and duck behind cover and reload because usually I have one gun I've put all my time and money into. Yeah. And then the other guns are like, if I ever run out of ammo on this main gun, I will now use this shittier gun. You have like a pipe gun or something like that. I just have a slingshot. I'm like, all right, here we are.
00:55:20
Speaker
Yeah, so very customizable experience. You can make the game easier. You can make the game harder. Tons of meta progression and unlocks, which I love. There's just, there's very, I was going to say, there's very few things about this game that I dislike. And then I realized if I said that I would be obligated to say at least one thing that I dislike. And I can't do that. Wait, three player co-op.
00:55:49
Speaker
There you go. Checkmate atheist. That's holding it back. That's it. Yeah. It's a, it's an honestly solid entry in rogue-like and I'm enjoying it. And I'm sure they're going to keep doing updates to it.
00:56:07
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a fun time. But it's not really access. I want to say this game is out. It is out. Yeah, it's fully out. It's my uncle at Thanksgiving. It's probably a little bit too much. All right. Well, hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode. If not, sucks to be you as always. Because you listened this far. Yeah. Rookie mistake, really. As always, you could send your feedback in if you want.
00:56:40
Speaker
to soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or you can join the discussion on Facebook, where we have a group set up at the URL facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. Also, if you Google us, you can find us. Yes, but you do have to put podcast soapstone is probably not enough.
00:56:58
Speaker
We're getting there. Yeah. And now I also admittedly, before I claimed that we're the number one result, as I did earlier to Dave, it could also be that my Google prioritizes, you know, any of our URLs because you searched enough times. Yeah. Uh, but people have never searched first search for soapstone podcast and, uh, tell us if we're number one also searched on Amazon. So they started asking what the fuck is soapstone podcast? We can get that sponsorship deal. Finally.
00:57:28
Speaker
As always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good one.