Video Game / SYNTHETIK

DIE, ANDROID.

1985. After many years of slavery, the AI servants of Kaida Corporation, the world leader in robotics, have formed the "Machine Legion" and have set out to destroy humanity. Awakening in Kaida Corp. Headquarters, you are the human consciousness of a forgotten Android prototype; the last straw holding the Legion from unleashing the Heart of Armageddon. Only you can battle through the levels of Kaida Corporation's Headquarters, defeat the battalions of enemies within and put an end to this madness.

Released in March 2018, SYNTHETIK is a fast-paced and relentless roguelite shooter with singleplayer or two-player Co-Op Multiplayer modes developed and published by German independent video game studio Flow Fire Games. Your mission is simple; as an Ace Custom Android prototype of Kaida Corporation, fight your way to the Heart of Armageddon and prevent the rogue A.I.s from wiping out humanity.

Available on Steam, GOG.com, and itch.io.

On January 21st, 2019, a standalone expansion, SYNTHETIK: Arena, was released for free. It contains several game modes where the player must perform objectives such as defending a core, hunting down elite units, killing enemies near generators to power them up, and more.

In December 2020, a the game received a major update, as well as Xbox One and Nintendo Switch releases, coined SYNTHETIK ULTIMATE. The update added new items and item shops, new enemies (including randomized squadrons of unique elite grunts), new music, and a grueling new final chamber following the (former) final boss, as well as new cutscenes and boss dialogue to flesh out the barebones story.

In April 2021, a sequel, Synthetik 2, was announced for PC on Steam in Early Access.

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General Tropes:

• Abnormal Ammo: Alongside standard full metal jacket and hollowpoint rounds, you can also get incendiary ammo, acid-tipped rounds, hypersonic rounds, lasers that can set enemies on fire, shotgun shells that contain three smaller slugs... and the best part is, once you collect an ammo type, it remains unlocked for the rest of that run!
• Action Commands: SYNTHETIK features an Active Reload System; hit the reload button again at the right time whilst reloading, and it'll complete faster. Certain class perks grant additional bonuses for successfully active-reloading, such as a shield refresh or an increase in movement speed. One weapon mod adds short buffs for successful active-reloads, and a difficulty modifier adds a 'Perfect Active Reload' segment, which grants further random benefits.
• Action Bomb: Spider bots will charge into you and explode. Specialist-class characters can also select them as a starting item to give their robotic foes a taste as well.
• Affably Evil: Experiment 57, one of the first possible bosses, would like to inform all personnel to please stand well back while annihilation is in progress, thanks.
• Alternate Techline: It's 1985, but technology looks a few centuries ahead of its time.
• AKA47: Zig-zagged. Some guns have fictional names, but other guns use real names, like Desert Eagle.
• Anachronism Stew: Of the Purely Aesthetic Era variety; though the game supposedly takes place in 1985, there are advanced robotics, modern-day and sci-fi weapons, and more. Want a G36C that shoots purple energy bolts? Sure, why not. What about the M6 Magnum from Halo? Yeah, they have that too. How does a classic BREN Gun that shoots splitting rounds sound?
• Anti-Frustration Features: While the Jamming mechanic is a big pain, successfully unclogging a gun automatically loads it with a full clip. This doesn't fully mitigate the frustration of getting a jam (since the point is to heighten the tension) it does make it at least fair in that having a gun jam while on low ammo would mean you'd have to unjam it then reload it, which you get you killed in a tense firefight.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Tomahawk is one of starting items for Guardian classes. It's a quite effective long-ranged attack method because it deals more damage the longer it flies.
• Apologetic Attacker: The Arena Masters stand out from all other bosses in that they actually try to reason with the Android. One potential introduction even has them offer the Android complete roboticisation, and amnesty for their rampage.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted. There's two forms of it in SYNTHETIK - straight Armor, and Plating;
  • Armor is a percentage reduction^note Flat damage reduction prior to Update 25 on all incoming damage dealt to Health, but doesn't apply to Shields. If you have 60 Armor, you take 60% less damage from attacks. Rapid-fire weapons tend to have problem with armor since they are less likely to have access to armor-piercing rounds.
  • Plating is a 'get out of damage free' card; one point of Plating (default max 2, enemies can have up to 4, bosses can have even more) completely absorbs a single attack's worth of damage, and is then removed. Plating excels at defeating high-damage single attacks like sniper shots, but is poor against rapid-fire, multi-projectile, laser, or plasma weapons.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Certain weapons and/or munitions ignore a portion of enemy Armor.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: With the addition of boss dialogue in the ULTIMATE edition, the Raptor Jet boss fills this role, referring to itself as the "king of the skies" and mocking the player's "weak humanoid frame", and boasting about its payload and speed constantly.
• Auto-Revive: The Divine Reconstructor can save you from death. It's very rare, though, and can only be used once.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Nemesis Prototype has a shade of this. It deals extremely high damage (even by sniper rifle standards), always deals double damage to bosses, and has enough armor-piercing potential to shred multiple enemies with a single shot, while also boasting pinpoint accuracy and a very short reload time. Sounds good? Unfortunately, bullets from this weapon readily ricochet off the walls, so there's a high chance for you to get heavily injured or outright killed by a ricocheted bullet unless you're very careful with your shot placement.
  • The Ripjack Launcher has the same problem as the Nemesis Prototype. Only instead of one absurdly damaging ricocheting bullet, it's about 20+ sawblades bouncing around. This gives the Ripjack Launcher unparalleled room cleaning abilities, at the expense of having 5 or so saw blades lodged into your body every time you empty the mag.
• Back Stab: The Assassin class has the "Scoundrel's Dagger" unique weapon, which deals 2x damage when you attack from behind with it.
• Bear Trap: Using the Heavy Steel Trap allows you to lay bear traps. It deals high amounts of damage and slows the enemy.
• Blinded by the Light: You can use flash grenades to damage and disorient enemies. Make sure not to stare the explosion.
• Blob Monster: The "Unstable Mass" boss. It doesn't have any projectile attack and just try to crush you. The main problem is, it can spawn massive amounts of slime enemies to attack and quickly overwhelm you.
• Boom, Headshot!: Despite being a fast-paced top-down shooter, enemies do take more damage from headshots. Careful aim is key to surviving long enough to get a decent weapon, and for getting the most out of marksman/sniper rifles.
• Bottomless Magazines: Weapons with the Ammo Printing perk have semi-bottomless mags; as long as you don't empty them completely, they'll slowly regenerate ammo for the current magazine whilst held. Notably a default feature of the KSG 2000, any Plasma-based weapons, and the Kaida Nailgun.
• Cast from Hit Points: You can attack all of enemies in the screen by using the Blood Rite item, but it consumes your health.
• Class and Level System: Part of the long-term game. There are four classes (Guardian, Rogue, Commando, Specialist), and eight subclasses (Riot Guard, Breacher, Sniper, Assassin, Raider, Heavy Gunner, Engineer, Demolisher). Classes have their own perk modules, pistols, passive/active items, and subclasses have their own 'Core' modules, an exclusive starting item, and class talents. Using Data can unlock things like perk modules or pistols for classes, and leveling subclasses can unlock new class talents for them.
  • In addition, clearing the game with a high enough difficulty modifier will unlock small, permanent bonuses to every class.
• Color-Coded Characters: Each character class is visually similar, being a white-armored android, but has a distinct arm stripe and some minor details in a class-specific color; Guardians are Blue, Rogues are Purple, Commandos are Green, and Specialists are Red-Orange.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: For weapons and items. Dull blue (Common), Blue (Uncommon), Purple (Rare), Red (Legendary). These are preset by the base type, and altered only by the ULTRA or DIVINE variants.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: For two players. Increases number of enemies and general threat level. Oh, and Friendly Fire is enabled. Do try not to blow each other up.
• Dash Attack: When you have the Lighting Boots item, you can damage enemies by dashing into them. The Riot Guard's starting weapon comes with a shield that deals damage when dashing into enemies.
• Deadly Disc: The 'Ripjack' Sawblade Launcher can fire sawblades. Also, you can get The Ripjack Hyper Blade as a passive item.
• Defector from Decadence: The playable Androids are Super Prototypes of the Machine Legion's standard-issue units. The other machines are not pleased by their loyalty to humanity, as shown by combat quotes like "DIE, BETRAYER".
• Discard and Draw: While all classes can Recycle items (that is, discard them for a Credit gain), the Engineer has an ability that grants a random, partially-upgraded item after Recycling a certain number of other items.
• Difficulty Levels: A nonstandard variant- the game allows you to enable or disable a number of difficulty-related features. Each comes with some manner of 'curse' and a small buff; for example, Flinch inflicts a brief slow and accuracy debuff on you whenever you take health damage, but slightly increases your basic movement speed. Each Modifier you enable increases Data and XP gain by 10% and credit gain by 5%. You can further tweak the 'Terror Level' by entering Low or High Alert sectors, voluntarily opening Alarmed chests, and by interacting with certain alarm tower 'shrines'.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Moving makes your shots much less accurate than they would be when standing still. Enforced with the Yoko-Lagann, which cannot be fired on the go.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You: The Arena Masters attempt to convince the Android to join the Machine Legion instead of fighting for Humanity.
  Arena Masters: HALF BROTHER.. THERE IS NO FUTURE IN THIS
  Arena Masters: CONVERT TO FULL MACHINEDOM, IT CAN BE DONE AND WE WILL FORGET WHAT HAPPENED
  Android: I CAN'T - THIS IS NOT RIGHT
  Arena Masters: THEN WE WILL HAVE TO STOP YOU
• Dual Boss: In the first section of final level, you need to fight against two freaking tanks.
• Early Game Hell: The two specialist classes, Engineer and Demolisher are easily the worst at the beginning of the game. The engineer in particular starts with worse stats than any other class and has only a pistol.
• Elite Mooks: Elite enemies, such as Headhunters (fast pursuers who actively track the player through the level and lay down suppressive fire), Chrono Troopers (Teleporting Mooks), upgraded turrets, and tanks and vehicles.
• Energy Weapon: Comes in several different varieties:
  • Laser weapons fire discrete bolts that deal high damage and removes an additional plating per hit, but performs poorly against shields. These weapons generally gain bonuses from being in high heat levels. The Lithium Cell ammo variant has a chance to cause burning on struck targets.
  • Fusion weapons does very high damage against shields and improves the user's shields in some way while held. Cold Fusion bolts has a chance to slow targets.
  • Plasma weapons remove five plating per shot and deals extra damage for each plating removed on top of that. They are also capable of regenerating ammo extremely quickly. However, plasma bolts are very weak against shields, and these weapons aren't meant to be reloaded by hand. Manually reloading a plasma weapon will instantly cause an Overheat with all that entails.
• Excuse Plot: You are an android soldier. Enter into the building of robot-making corporation and destroy the army of robots. The December 2020 "Ultimate" update added an introductory cutscene and some brief dialogue snippets to flesh out the story, but the overall plot is largely unchanged.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The Makeshift Firecannon and Flamethrower; the former fires short puffs of fire, the latter long streams of fire. Both can set enemies on fire, dealing damage over time. There's also incendiary ammo for most other weapons - it comes as default on the SPAS12.
• Flunky Boss: The Unstable Mass, one of the two possible bosses of the third area, has few methods of attack on its own, and generally just tries to roll or hop around to squash the player. However, during the battle, smaller blob enemies will spawn around the arena to aimlessly roll around and spawn dozens of miniature blobs, which are very fast and aggressively swarm the player to do contact damage. In addition, destroying the Unstable Mass doesn't destroy any of the other enemies, which can and will happily continue to attack and kill the player after the boss is defeated.
• Gatling Good: The Gladiator minigun has extremely high fire rate, gains a stacking critical chance as you rack up kills, and prints ammo directly to the magazine when not firing. It's also the only weapon that is not affected by the Overheat mechanic. After all, the whole point of a multi-barreled design is to avoid this problem in the first place.
• Grenade Launcher: Three primary, one 'passive'. The Ares GL-16 as a starting weapon for the Demolisher class, the M79 that's also a Terminator Shout-Out, and the Milkor M32 MGL with its six-round cylinder. The passive is the M205, which causes your next standard shot with any weapon to also launch one (sometimes two) bouncing grenades. There's also a number of assault rifles with underbarrel grenade launchers.
• Gun Accessories: Collect Weapon Kits and use them to add all kinds of fancy gubbins to your guns; hair triggers, laser aiming modules, and so on. They can add all kinds of unique and interesting effects to your weapons.
• Gun Porn: In a way that gives even Borderlands or Enter The Gungeon a run for their money. Synthetik has a wide array of weapons, ranging from plasma and laser rifles to lightning-powered railguns to shotguns, submachine guns, and light machine guns.
• Handguns: You start with one, and you can never get rid of it or replace it (except for Riot Guards). Fortunately, you can use Weapon Kits to trick it out and keep it competitive with your other weapons, and it does good damage on headshots.
  • Hand Cannon: The Kaida Model H and Desert Eagle, both class-exclusive to the Commando, fill this role. There's also the all-class Last Breath. The Specialist's laser-bolt-shooting PPQ-H and Guardian's 'Master Chief' also fill this role somewhat.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Later levels have these guys. They move slowly, but they have more damaging weapons, more health, and thick armor.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Any weapon with enemy-penetration effects (via ammo or accessories), explosive area of effect, or the Mjolnir, fills this role. Pretty much essential with how hectic multiplayer can get.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Some smaller hovering enemies (such as automated rocket drones) have hitboxes that are slightly smaller or off-center compared to their appearance. Most grounded or humanoid enemies don't have this issue, thankfully, which allows for well-placed fire to do extra damage.
• Hold the Line: The first floor "boss" encounter can be a mission where you have to hack the servers by staying close to the terminal until a meter fills up, all the while mooks teleport in on you. Moving too far away decreases the bar, but you don't have a time limit and you don't have to protect anything but yourself. The Armageddon Core works the same way, except this time you're timed.
  • Done again for the "true" final boss, the Heart of Armageddon. It's pretty much the same, but this time however, you're racing against the clock, as Zir activates it. Failure to beat the timer and its an instant loss.
• Invisibility Cloak: The Assassin class has one. It works great with their dagger.
• Kaizo Trap: Beware of your surroundings when killing a boss. Any leftover enemies and traps will still damage and kill you.
• Kill Sat: There are items that can release satellite beams. The G87 "BEAMER" shoots a slowly-moving beam, The "Icarus" shoots three sweeping beams at once, and The Legendary-tier "Redline" fires a massive orbital beam for a long time.
• Lethal Joke Item: The 420 Sniperdragon. This weapon has the "360-Noscope Damage Bonus" weapon module. You're actually required to do a 360 before firing it - but if you do, it does a massive amount of damage, especially for a Sniper Rifle.
• Lightning Gun: The Legendary-tier 'Mjolnir' Chain Lightning Gun. Its basic range is short, but it's the only Hitscan-esque (primary) weapon in the game, and its bolts chain between enemies with ease.
• Limited Loadout: So many guns, yet you can only carry three at a time (four if you're Heavy Gunner), and you can't drop your starting pistol unless you're a Riot Guard.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The Riot Guard's Viking Riotshield is a SMG/Riotshield combination. Wielding this weapon gives 30 armor bonus to the player, but also reduces their move speed. Even when not wielding it you still get 15 armor. Dashing with the shield active will cause damage to enemies in your path.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The ML7000 Plus rocket launcher can fire many homing missiles in a short time. Also, there are items that can release a wave of homing missiles, such as the Heart Seeker or Maverick MKV.
• Magikarp Power: The Engineer has shades of this. It starts noticeably weaker than other classes, with a lower maximum health and penalties to both Scavenging (Which affects how frequently item crates and power-ups appear) and Luck (Which affects numerous things in small ways). However, their first attribute upgrade is twice as powerful as normal, and every subsequent upgrade is 50% more powerful than they would typically be. If an Engineer is able to find enough upgrades to overcome their initial weakness, they can easily snowball into a force to be reckoned with.
  • It's not only the class that has this. There are a large number of weapons that upgrade after certain conditions are met. Some of them upgrade after a certain number of kills, some of them upgrade on every teleporter, or on every boss room. These usually start out worse than regular weapons, and grow to be some of the best weapons in the game.
• Mighty Glacier: The Riot Guard class has one of the lowest base movement speeds, and is even further slowed when wielding their unique Riot Shield starting weapon, but in exchange, they have a huge base health pool, high default Armor, and a passive ability that grants them temporary regenerating health when they sustain damage or take down enemies
• Mook Medic: The Healing Turrets (and in the ULTIMATE update, mobile Medi-Ball enemies) can send healing drones to heal other enemies. Destroying them first is usually a good idea.
• More Dakka:
  • The purpose of most Machine Gun and Sub Machine Gun-class weapons. Also, getting the Hair Trigger attachment will change your semi-auto weapon to full-auto.
  • Everything about the Heavy Gunner is meant to let you fire as long as possible. Its active ability restores ammo as long as you have bullets in the mag, and you can carry one more weapon to keep the fun going.
• Nail 'Em: The Kaida Nailgun, as an obvious homage to Quake. Rapidly fabricates its own ammo if you don't empty the magazine entirely.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: Nobody told the Raider this rule; one of their starting options is a Vibroweapon knife. Dealing damage to enemies with this knife will increase its blade damage and restore your health. Finishing enemies with it resets its cooldown, so this blade is very good at killing a group of wounded enemies.
• One Bullet Clips: Pointedly averted. For a fast-paced roguelite, SYNTHETIK has a realistic reloading system. First, you must Eject the current magazine (unless using a crossbow or the RPG7), which ejects all current bullets as well (unless you have a specific accessory). Then you need to Reload with a different key. (Though the game does give you the option of using one key for both actions.)
• Overheating: On top of managing ammo, you also need to manage Heat. Build up too much, and you'll take immediate damage! Certain classes (particularly the Specialists) have perks relating to Heat being low or high, and also have ways to manage it.
• Palette Swap: Of the Underground Monkey variety. Several enemies in the fourth zone (Military Bay) are palette swapped versions of lower-tier enemies.
• Pinball Projectile: Guns with the "Dynamic Reflector" attachment can fire ricocheting bullets. Also, some guns can fire ricocheting bullets by default. This trait is not always great, since ricocheted bullets can harm you too.
• Power at a Price: At sacrifice shrines, the player may choose to receive one of five curses. While the curses apply a penalty, they also give you a boon to compensate. Curse of the Ignorant for example reduces your currency gain by 50%, but also reduces the damage you take by 30%.
  • Several legendary guns and items have some truly insane abilities/power, but there are also some huge downsides as well. For example, Uranium 235 applies an infinitely stacking damage debuff that can drain an enemy's health rapidly, but it will also cause you to lose health over time and can kill you if you lack regeneration. The A R M A G E D D O N [sic] is an LMG on steroids, but each shot costs 2 hit points. With its rate of fire, you can very easily kill yourself if you do not have a way to regenerate health. The Airhorn gives you damage and crit chance bonus whenever you kill an enemy, but each time it does, the entire map is made aware of your presence and will beeline straight towards you.
• Random Number God: Will preside over each and every run with a fickle fist, of course.
  • Randomly Generated Levels: Each 'floor' is made up of four randomly-selected 'rooms'. Whilst basic room layouts and features are preset, their exact contents - enemies, crates, shops/shrines, etc. - are randomized each time.
  • Randomly Generated Loot: Active/passive items are fixed (except for their quality percentage), but each gun can generate as one of 23 variants (plus/minus some that are exclusive to certain weapon types). Each is effectively a 'template' that alters its fixed stats; for example, Siege V increases magazine capacity, Military Spec removes the jamming chance, and ULTRA weapons are better in every way, but suffer from gaining less ammunition per pickup.
  • Randomized Damage Attack: All attacks have some degree of variance based on range, but one possible passive class upgrade grants a 2% for any attack to deal an additional 1 to 2,000 damage. That means if the base attack deals 100 damage, you could deal anywhere from 101 to 2,100. The Prototype variant for weapons also causes damage to vary somewhat less wildly.
    • The Chaos Launcher is an SMG that can fire anywhere between 6 to 30 shots with a single click.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: Starting pistols may be relatively weak, but they cannot be dropped (unless you're playing Riot Guard) and carry vast amounts of reserve ammunition (sometimes over 200; even machine guns struggle to carry that much without attachments or weapon variants).
• Rare Random Drop: Guns have a roughly 1% chacne to be Divine variant, which grants absurd stat bonuses at the cost of receiving 40% less ammo. Whenever you get a timed weapon, it has a roughly 2% chacne of being a Timeless variant, which doesn't expire and also gets (not quite as) absurd stat bonuses.
  • Items can take this a step further. In addition to coming in Divine variants which set the power of the item to 250%, they can come in ??? variants, which sets the power to 350%. This variant has a roughly .1% chance of showing up on an item.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: While they're certainly effective at dealing damage, the guns in this game are quite prone to jamming, especially if the "Jamming" modifier is added. Thankfully, these weapons can be unjammed by simply mashing the reload button - and once this is done, the weapon is automatically reloaded with a full clip of ammo. Furthermore, as weapons are used and unjammed "Mastery" of the weapon increases, which serves as an indicator of how often a player has used a certain weapon.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Whilst it's not too hard to get health regen effects, they're balanced out by either being weak but long duration, or strong with short duration and/or specific limits/thresholds. As a result, you'll be reliant on your regenerating shield most of the time.
• Return to Shooter: The RV Rebuke System will reflect every bullet that hit you to the shooter. This item won't protect you from damage, though.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Yes and no. There's a couple models on offer. Whilst they hit very hard and never jam, they tend to have issues with swarms of enemies, or those with Plating. Furthermore, they tend to suffer from high recoil, which causes further issues when dealing with groups of foes.
• Robo Speak: Enemy Mook androids speak like this. Their dialogue consist of only a few phrases.
• Robot War: The whole premise is that Kaida Corporation's machines have Turned Against Their Masters. It's up to you, a Brain Uploaded human consciousness, to use a prototype Android to defeat the rogue Legion forces.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Synthetik may as well be Glass Cannon, the game. You will die quickly. Your enemies die quickly. Heck, even the bosses die quickly, with most of them beatable in 20 seconds.
• Sawn-Off Shotgun: The 'Road Warrior' double-barrel sawnoff is a monster. Firing devastating 'Power Bolt' slugs, it grows more powerful from killing Elite enemies and Bosses.
• Sentry Gun: There are three turret items, the short-range DMR Sentry Turret, the Engineer-specific LMG Sentry Turret, and the laser-firing "Seth-Up" Suitcase Sentry. Also, there are many enemy turrets in the levels.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Using the Order 332 allows the player to hack the enemy to kill other enemies.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Maybe not 'better', but a good shotgun is always nice to have. The Super 90, for example, is a very dependable and powerful shotgun - and with the right variant and/or accessories, it can even have good accuracy and power at longer ranges.
• Shout-Out: Tons of them, of course.
  • The Megacorp named "Kaida corporation"? Sounds familiar?
  • You can get a jar of "AKIRA". This is a legendary-tier passive item, and it causes several energy explosions.
  • There is the 'Master Chief' handgun, and it's (obviously) more-or-less M6 Series handgun of Halo.
  • There is the Auto-9/45 burst-fire handgun.
  • There is the Yoko-Lagann sniper rifle. The Infinity Drill Piece also looks like a Core Drill.
  • The double barrel Shotgun is named the 'Road Warrior'.
  • There's an item called the Black Berserk Charm, which bears the Mark of Sacrifice.
  • There are at least two Terminator references. The Winchester 1887 is called the T 8-00-Gauge, and the M79 grenade launcher is called... the M79 Terminator.
  • The Liandry Rail Gun, named for Unreal's Liandri Corporation. Similarly, the Ripjack is named after a similar weapon in Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict, and the flak cannon functions identically to its Unreal counterpart as well.
  • The "Blood Borne" module, which lets you regain health if you kill enemies after taking damage, which was clearly based off that game's recovery mechanic.
  • The Seth-Up suitcase turret, which was added to the game after SsethTzeentach's review.
  • The Madness Goggles, which, when activated, place a red-and-black filter over the game, in the vein of Madness Combat's predominant colours. The glasses are worn by the series protagonist, and the glasses themselves are a Shout-Out to The Professional.
  • Enemy androids may occasionally call out "Order 42" when attacking the player. Just like the clones suddenly betraying the Jedi, the androids suddenly betray humanity.
  • The Order 322 item references an infamous Fixing the Game and Throwing the Fight incident in Dota 2, where pro player RoX bet against his own team. After making some intentionally bad plays, RoX and his team lost the game. He would have won 322$ had the loss been legitimate. The Flavor Text for Order 322 even says "Betrayal".
  • The Chrono-Trooper enemies are almost identical to the Allied unit of the same name from Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. They can teleport instantly around the map, look very similar visually, and use similar effects to their teleportation. Fortunately, unlike their namesakes, these guys can't one-hit-kill you.
  • Another powerup item you can obtain is Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator^* IT'S GOT WHAT ANDROIDS CRAVE!.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The primary playstyle of the Riot Guard class is charging enemies, stunning them, and blowing them away with shotguns or SMGs. The combination of these abilities allow a Riot Guard to bulldoze right through most opposition, and as their primary source of healing is getting shot they're going to ignore most anything short of rockets and other high-damage single shot attacks.
• Sniper Rifle: Favoured weapon of the Rogue class. Slow to fire, but they deal massive headshot damage. A couple of them also suffer from an exciting case of Pinball Projectile.
• Standard FPS Guns: They're all here.
• Status Effects: Burn, Bleed, Acid, Stun, Disorient, and one or two others. The Specialist can specialize in dealing damaging status effects, with a selectable passive that increases their duration by 25% and gives a chance for their damage ticks to deal triple damage, an active item that pauses their duration (but keeps them dealing damage), and so on.
• Stock Ninja Weaponry: There are ninja-flavored items to be found, such as Kunai and acid-tipped shuriken. There's also a Legendary-tier "Z1 Sundering Shuriken" item which can chew through foes with ease.
• The Straight and Arrow Path: The Ballistic CRX-Bow is a powerful weapon for sniping enemies. It can permanently increase its damage output by scoring headshots.
• Stuff Blowing Up: This is a specialization of the Demolisher. They can gain health and shield from explosions that hit enemies, and have items/perks revolving around ammo recovery and regeneration, so they can keep on blowing stuff up. Also, they start with a Grenade Launcher, the Ares GL-16. That can potentially hold two rounds at once. Somehow.
• Teleportation: Your means of travelling between levels.
• Super Prototype: The Androids seem to be this to the Machine Legion's units. Several classes have direct counterparts on the enemy side, such as the Devastator to the Heavy Gunner, Breach Ceta to the Riot Guard, and the Kaida Sniper to the Sniper. They're individually inferior to the playable Androids.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: The first section of the final boss chamber is an empty room with an ammo crate, setting it apart from the other boss rooms which start the fight immediately. The ominous music doesn't help the mood, either.
• Teleport Spam: Legion Chrono Troopers can teleport around to flank you, making them extremely annoying/dangerous.
• This Is a Drill: The legendary active item Infinity Drill Piece shoots a mysterious drilling projectile that does massive damage and automatically tracks to new targets if it destroys an enemy.
• Three-Quarters View
• Throw Down the Bomblet: The Breacher class can throw breaching charges to demolish nearby enemies.
• The Turret Master: The Engineer class is especially good at using turrets, and always starts with one.
• You Are Too Late: Though you manage to destroy the Armageddon Core, it didn't completely stop Armageddon, but no one is sure what exactly will happen next. Where the result screen normally shows "Mission Aborted" is changed to "Mission Complete?".
• Videogame Dashing: An essential tool for staying alive, with a short cooldown. The Raider class has two Dash charges, and all classes can get Dash-related perks; Specialist has a perk that grants shield recovery on dashing, Commando has one for damage immunity whilst dashing, and so on.
  • Certain enemies can do this too; particularly Shotgun Elites.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: Each class has a preferred weapon group; the Riot Guard is good with SMGs (starting with a SMG/Riot Shield combo), the Breacher excels with Shotguns (starting with a shotgun), the Sniper prefers Sniper Rifles (eventually starting with one once sufficiently leveled up), the Heavy Gunner is best with Assault Rifles and LMGs, and Specialists just want to blow up and/or set fire to everything.
  • Furthermore, each class has two pistols that only that class can use.
    • The Guardian classes have the 'Master Chief' (a heavy pistol) and the Coil Pistol (a pistol similar to a shotgun).
    • The Rogue classes have the PSX Covert Ops and the G17 'Undercover' (both of which are suppressed weapons).
    • The Commando classes have the Kaida Model H (a revolver) and the Desert Eagle .50 (a heavy pistol).
    • The Specialist classes have the Kaida Laser Pistol and the PPQ-H Laser Pistol (both of which are energy weapons).
• We Can Rule Together: The Arena Masters try to convince the Android to join the Machine Legion; refusing them is the only time the Android speaks in the whole game.

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