On paper, Synduality: Echo of Ada sounds exactly like my kind of game. You’re in a huge mech called a “Cradlecoffin”, which is about the most metal sounding name for a mech I’ve ever heard, you’re accompanied at all times by the ghost of a waifu you can dress up, and your job is to head into the dangerous wildlands and loot everything you can find.
And yet, in execution Synduality falls short of my expectations. For a start it’s the usual mix of anime nonsense and post-apocalyptic melodrama that we’ve seen a million times before, wherein everyone is just a bit too earnest for the silly premise. Your job as a Drifter is to pilot the Cradlecoffin while the echo of a Magus floats around beside you, offering tactical support and insight. Weirdly, or perhaps not, you don’t ever see your protagonist out of the suit, and can only customise the mech itself and your Magus, although options for both are limited at this point.
You’ll head out on expeditions with the intention of gathering supplies and resources before finding a special orbital lift and extracting with the goods. Activating the lift will spawn endless enemies for a set period of time, and alert all the other Drifters (see: players) in the area. The enemies are bad enough, but the players want your loot – and it’s amazing how mercenary everyone becomes when that alarm sounds. People you’ve passed multiple times with not but a wave will suddenly want you super dead so they can load up on all your gear.
What makes this infuriating as a concept in Synduality: Echo of Ada is that your initial Cradlecoffin has the hull integrity of a bacon sandwich in a flushed toilet, and you’ll die in seconds. My first few forays into the game ended abruptly when I was nuked from a distance by a rival Drifter that I didn’t even know was there. To rub salt, pepper, and two types of vinegar into the wound, they then stole my pre-order bonus mech skin and there was no way for me to get it back without stealing it from some other poor clueless shmuck. Beware though, because if you do this you’ll be dropped into tougher servers with higher level or more aggressive players.
Anyway, increasing the size and scope of your mech’s wardrobe is secondary to finding and retrieving AO Crystals (which stands for Amorphous Orange). You’ll find veins of these comically-named crystals dotted around and must drill into them to retrieve the goods. Again, this is where other players will show up to ambush you and rob you like council estate louts round an ATM. And not just other players, but Enders, too, the mutated monsters that prowl the wilds.
Sadly, Synduality begins to struggle the moment you enter the game world. As a third-person extraction shooter, it’s fine. As a throwaway anime sci-fi story, also fine. But it’s the online-only element that troubles it most. The world just isn’t interesting enough to justify the headache of being constantly ganked by other players, and the loot isn’t enticing enough when it takes so long to grind for better gear, or a different coloured pair of trousers for your Magus.
The world is pretty enough, sure, but the enemy design is kind of staid, and this world of glistening lakes, and ruins hewn from marble and chrome never managed to capture my imagination. There’s no real sense of atmosphere to it, no sense of place, and your Magus constantly warning you that something is coming just puts you constantly on edge for fights that don’t materialise.
Controlling the Cradlecoffin and activating its various weapons and abilities, as well as your Magus’ special skills, is responsive enough, but outside of desperate fights with other players the enemies don’t do much to bring you down unless you’re attempting evac, at which point they’ll swarm you like ants on a Cherry Bakewell and you’ll need to work harder to stay alive. It’s a weird dichotomy that never seemed to balance out for me, especially as once you’ve improved your gear a little even the extraction isn’t all that tough.
In between missions you’ll visit a hangar where you can upgrade and outfit your Cradlecoffin, alter your Magus’ appearance, trade resources for gear and accept side objectives for the next mission. Be prepared to grit your teeth pretty damn hard when you forget to insure a really good weapon or mech part and lose it in the field, though – there’s no way to get things back once they’re gone. There is a battle pass, of course, that lets you unlock cosmetics and boosters, but the best stuff is on the premium track and the game isn’t free to play in the first place.
A lack of map, mission, or enemy variety meant that on the excursions where I either saw no one or they were all friendly, I got swiftly bored. I can pick flowers without a giant mech suit, frankly, and sometimes Synduality: Echo of Ada failed to justify the awesomeness of its concept. That said, if all you’re after is a mostly chilled extraction game occasionally broken up by fights to the death and waifu baths, you could do worse – it’s just a shame there isn’t as little more to this one.
