ECHO PlayStation 4 Pro Review

ECHO is a dark science-fiction tale that challenges you to defeat yourself. By using your actions as a learning tool the enemies that populate Echo's decorated world. The tale is servable, explaining the difficulties of life, death, and purpose but much of Echo's excitement comes from defeating the clones that have adapted your previous tactics. The game does break down towards the end by introducing a cliche powerful foe but Echo's A.I. manipulating system encouraged me to try new things and learn from my past actions.

Echo opens with a strong premise. As En you travel into a desolate Palace teeming with exotic items and large rooms. When entering the Palace for the first time it created a sensation of fear and wonder. You know something is wrong but you go deeper anyway until you encounter the Echos; clones of En who learn and mimic everything she does.

Here's where Echo's biggest challenge and captivating twist lies, the labyrinth monitors all of En's actions and appears as icy-looking holograms. These records are fed it back into the Echoes and used to hunt En down. The reboot is when they adapt to your previous actions and learn new skills based on your activities, these are triggered when the power turns off followed by a blackout and forgetting what happened during the previous blackout.

Blackouts are triggered after a specific amount of actions are performed, not on a timer. Once it starts a timer begins and the Palace shouldn't be able to copy your actions, however, I experienced multiple situations where the game broke its own rules. After a sound indicator, the PS4's rumble feature starts to shake the controller and depending on how hard determines when the blackout is about to occur.

En is a Resourceful, someone trained equipped for deadly situations like these. She has a standard pistol capable of killing anything within its line of sight for a specific distance. It can send a shockwave to repel enemies. In addition, En can sprint for a small amount of time, perform non-lethal pushes, and sneak. If you feel completely overwhelmed a scanner is available to provide the locations of every clone within a specific area. Everything can be copied by the clones and used against you.

What sells the narrative is the amazing cutscenes and the voice actors of En, voiced by Game of Thrones Rose Leslie, and London, voiced by Dragon Age's Nick Boulton. En is a special case, she constantly talks about her specialized training but it never manifests into anything. While there's a sense of bravery to her actions he talents never exceed anything monumental. Despite all the dialogue pointing towards En being some highly-trained warrior she's barebones in all her actions. 

London, on the other hand, is much more interesting. A sentient A.I. it constantly criticizes En but at the same time provides assistance in her suicidal mission. He acts cynical and bitter but underneath it, all has a reason for all his harsh words. 

Sneak up from behind and the robots will skulk silently around the area. Shoot the place up and now the robots are loaded with weapons. It even extends to how the player interacts with the environment if the player runs a lot the robots will become more aggressive and if they see you dive into the water they'll do the same. Using what they learned from the previous blackout is useful to survival, for example, in one situation the clones were able to walk through water but couldn't vault over railings. Allowing me to take one escape route when another was useless. 

This game of cat and mouse has its limits though. Every action is linked to an energy cell system that can be refilled using generators littered around the labyrinth. Since these are limited resources you cannot just do whatever you want. Instead, resource management plays a key role in plotting a course to safety then attempting to find a new way that counters the same strategy. Echo regularly required me to change tactics and beat myself encouraged me to play outside my comfort zone.

Sneaking isn't effective but encouraged. Clones have amazing sight and can spot you with ease but cannot hear you running from inches away. Given they don't require stamina to run breaking line of sight is nearly impossible. Strangely despite having poor hearing enemies will head towards where you shoot your pistol instead of the location of the dead body.

Combat yields different results when up to 3-5 Echos are killed it'll trigger a blackout. This can seem unfair seeing that En can only kill using her pistol, by picking and hitting an Echo with a crystal ball but it can't kill an Echo by throwing it for some reason and kicking Echos off ledges. Shoving isn't an effective tool since Echos can stand up within a second and somehow know where you are after the action is performed. This was infuriated since after shoving an Echo it immediately ran to the location after the action, how did it know where I ran?

What's also strange is that the Echos can return to life. Even after suffering a lethal blow, they'll come back after each blackout with the techniques you already performed. If you die you must start from the beginning, unless you find a checkpoint. Given that En dies within 2 grabs, can only run for a small amount of time, and has only 1 non-lethal ineffective tactic death can become a norm. This can become especially vexing during orb collecting objectives where En must gather at least 5-15 orbs within an area. Every time I saw one of these tasks the joy of playing Echo immediately vanished from me and all that remains was the desire to get through it. Since enemies respawn after each blackout tasks like these can become unreasonable annoying.

The biggest issue comes from variety. While the Labyrinth itself is fantastic, with lavishly decorated rooms eventually the aesthetic wears thin in the later hours. The only break comes in occasional maintenance periods that separate milestones within the game. With the exception of the finale, the enemies share En's model and after facing the same foes. However, towards the end, En faces an unbelievable powerful enemy that can't be killed, will immediately kill you if seen, and has all of En's tactics. This new enemy breaks the entire flow of the game and cripples Echo's defining characteristic. 

But what's the point of fighting homicidal clones with a desire to learn? En wants to save someone, a man named Foster whose soul is trapped in a cube. En hopes that the research conducted by her grandfather about an advanced place called The Palace could house the technology that can bring the dead back to life.

Echo requires constant thought and planning, attempting to rush your way through will lead to a quick death. Combating the Echoes after they've mastered your previous tactics offers uniquely gratifying ways to better yourself. It can be challenging and sometimes unfair. It's an amazing mixture of AI programming and evolving enemies that encourages creativity and problem solving instead of just heading towards the goal. 

Adam Siddiqui, NoobFeed
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