Not recommended right now.


Legend:

Synthetik 1 (S1)
Synthetik 2 (S2)
UI (User Interface and its extended features such as sound that goes along with interactivity)
Contrasts (color, movement, sound, information)


Before you read:

I've played and studied S1 thoroughly in terms of meta and consider it a world-wide unique game. I will compare S2 to it directly, looking at what has "changed" going from old to new.


UI and perception:

What struck me as easier than most games regarding Synthetik 1 was that the UI as the visual periphery and sound experience significantly helps you staying alive. It's either there in the peripheral, acting out in sound and movement but also color. It is a good system of feedback that would allow you to escalate the madness and so allow yourself to never having to check if your shield got back up again - you would hear it. Your eyes don't have to jump around to make sure abilities aren't on cool down or heat build up of a gun, and it was above all easy to spot what things were active, ready or on cool down. With the Kaida H I can tell how many bullets I have left on the sound of it firing alone and since the reverbing blade is on RMB I can see the left most item (the RMB location) at all times in the peripherals, and plasma weapons lets me switch on muscle memory when the ammo bar scales with the heat. It was easy to see because the UI was relatively naked and had good signalling for statuses across the board.

All of that, and all of those benefits are no longer present in S2. Furthermore it's one of the worse examples of convoluted menus and UI I've seen in a while where very little makes sense both semantically and traditionally.
You're imediately starved instead, considering that S2 is a 3D game and therefore has so much more contrasts for the player to deal with, sort, adapt to, react to and survive. My point is, It's even more important now to have a reactive and clear UI. The UI is now clad in frames that lets nothing hierarchically protrude, moved away from player awareness to such an extent that you can't really be sure if the cooldown is complete or if it's just about to be ready. The UI should at least be precisely as bare bones and correctly exposed to the player as it was in S1, otherwise it's just waiting for someone to properly mod it in terms of UI and UX. In S1, everything about the UI was utilitarian, no matter the state it was in. If information will be increasingly hidden away from the player in S2, it cannot be played in the same chaotic and fast-paced way S1 was. I can't see it happening when your attention needs to be on two separate corners of your screen as well as the avatar and the mouse.


Scavenging:

In S1, the frequency of unique run opportunities was absolutely linked to the frequency of item and weapon upgrade opportunities in the game. Consider this: for every time you pick up a weapons upgrade kit you could upgrade something, recycle it or whatever else that your class and playstyle would favour. Following that up, a weapons upgrade station can increase the upgrade frequency additionally throughout the run. Money spent on individual items could turn a dull grenade into a super item in just a few rooms. It catered to immediate routing of a players meta tactics for that run.

In S2, upgrade kits is its own currency and will therefore, with the current setup, lead to less opportunities of immediate routing of a players meta playstyle since you rely on the correct shop to appear. I want to stress this importance, because in S1, having the skill to survive and know-how of what you need to turn a shotgun into a minigun was somehow never far away for the player to do - actually routing the run down a path of possible meta. But also because if you had bad luck and the shop you needed didn't show up, it wasn't the only way to upgrade stuff, to "proceed the run". In S2 it will become rare to upgrade something and run-based meta will be barren, but by introducing another currency besides money to simply blanket-apply to any weapon along the run is not a bad thing, but starves the player on options, looked at on a room-by-room comparison.


Popular behaviour on strategies in runs:

What we will see now, however, is that no player will stick to one pre-made class since modding is an option. This will be the most meta- and strategy-heavy instance by far, to the extent of making the credit currency, the newly introduced "weapon parts" currency and upgrade shops redundant. We will see tactics and playstyles generally pre-determined because of this, and less things up to chance and chaos.

I want to leave this with the following: if you've seen what the devs started with regarding S1 and what it ended up with, know then what great potential S2 has. I don't recommend this game right now, but I've purchased it to support the developers. When S2 has matured I will return to this review.


Judge responsibly!