SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada PS5 Review

I love robots, or more accurately, mechs, and games where you get to pilot them, from the classics like Mechwarrior and Armored Core to more obscure titles like S.L.A.I and Phantom Crash, I’ll take them all.  SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada, developed by Game Studio Inc. and published by Namco Bandai lets players climb aboard Cradlecoffins, giant bipedal mecha, and stomp around the ruins of Earth.

Players assume the role of a Drifter, whose goal is to collect rare and mysterious AO crystals that now scatter a land ravaged by a toxic rain called ‘The Tears of the New Moon’. Supported by an AI companion called a Magus. Drifters venture out into the wilds to collect these crystals and fight off mutated creatures called Ender.

In the 30 or so hours I’ve played of SYNDUALITY, that brief synopsis is about all I’ve been able to decipher of the plot. Any story and lore are drip-fed to the player at a glacial rate. To say that SYNDUALITY is a slow burner in that regard, would be an understatement.

In terms of gameplay, time is split between two distinct areas. Firstly, there’s your home base. A place to build and upgrade your Cradecoffin, craft supplies and upgrades, and generally take part in the management of your entire operation. This entire section is wholly menu-based and can feel a little sluggish to get around at times, but beyond that, it’s perfectly serviceable for a base micro-management sim akin to that seen in the newer XCOM titles.

Secondly, is the time spent piloting your Cradlecoffin, out and about in the open world. Calling it an open world might be a little generous. At the time of writing, there are two areas available, a northern and southern expanse, with each being a couple of kilometres across, acting more like oversized arenas rather than the typical open world you’d see in something like GTA. Upon initiating a sortie, players get to choose which of the two areas to deploy to (assuming the latter has been unlocked, of course), and venture out into the world.

Every time you venture out into the map, a random insertion point is chosen from a large selection, meaning it’s hit and miss whether you’re going to be near your current objective. The travel time is never very long, though, so this isn’t really a problem; And given the amount of time you’re going to be spending just milling around the wastes looking for supplies, you’ll quickly become familiar with each sector.

Time spent in the area is dictated by a few things. The two overriding factors that trump all else, however, are power and weight. Your mecha is battery-powered, and as such as a finite amount of time that can be spent before being stranded, and just as in death, any progress is lost should this happen. Each Coffin has a limited carrying capacity. Every item and resource that’s picked up or taken on sorties has weight, and once you hit the limit of your current machinery, there isn’t much else that can be done aside from heading for the nearest extraction point and coming back later.

The coffins themselves are piloted from a third-person perspective, with a slightly over-the-shoulder camera that is just a little too close for comfort for me, a field-of-view slider would have been nice. The world has a claustrophobic feel to it. A combination of the camera being a little too close for comfort and the world itself is absolutely stuffed to the brim with clutter and detail that makes getting around kind of awkward. On the one hand, it’s a very impressive world, Game Studio Inc. has made every effort to fill every corner, alley, and structure with something. On the other hand, it’s just not very fun to traverse the map.

Despite the world being full to the brim with stuff, it can be a very lonely place. There are no NPCs as such to encounter while you’re out, only the occasional enemy and, even rarer, other players. Along with being an extraction shooter, SYNDUALITY is also a live service game, so it’s perpetually online. It’s largely a PvPvE experience, though, in my time in the game, I only came across a hostile player on one occasion.

I can only assume that this was down to most people realising early on, that death is really not worth the risk PvP combat entails. On death, everything carried is lost. Everything. This includes weapons and Coffin parts and most infuriatingly of all, anything you were carrying that was a reward from the battle pass. It’s possible to get back to your corpse in another sortie and reclaim everything, though chances are good that some other play will have looted your body at that point. There is an insurance system, where the value of selected gear is refunded on death, but it’s so expensive to use that it hardly seems worth it.

In the early game combat rarely yields any rewards that make the risk of getting destroyed worth engaging. It can take hours to get back to the same point in terms of equipment. Just as the story is a slow burner, progression in general is at a snail’s pace. Much of the early game is just going on sortie after sortie, looking for the one resource that’s necessary to craft a new upgrade, or that is required for a particular mission.

This loop of heading out in the world, and scavenging materials while completing various tasks, which generally devolves into gathering X of Y items or killing several enemies. Then return to base and maybe craft a new upgrade or turn in items for a mission is the core of the experience. It’s entirely possible that with this being a live service title, I didn’t get to some kind of endgame content that changes things up, but I saw little to hint at it in 30 hours of play.

The world is at least interesting to look at. A lot of effort has been put into making it a visually striking place. Graphics it’s not exactly cutting edge, but it’s nice enough looking for it not to be a problem. The audio, however, it’s been a while since I’ve played a game with such poor audio design. Weapons mostly lack any kind of punch, and the music is an irritating loop for the most part, constantly beeping and booping away in the background. Your Magus has some reasonable voice acting, but they don’t ever shut up. Constant verbal diarrhea, endlessly repeating the same handful of dialogue over and over, which, most of the time, is pointing out blatantly obvious things.

Final Thoughts?

SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada is an odd duck, in more than just name. It feels like it’s missing something. I don’t know what that something is, but something that would change it from a mildly inconvenient but unoffensive (for the most part) scavenger hunt to something more.

It isn’t without merit, far from it. There are a few interesting concepts at work, the aforementioned ‘Teas of the New Moon’ comes into play in gameplay. Rain damages your Coffin should you be caught in it. The idea I assume, was to create a risk vs reward system, do you venture out into the weather to grab those last few supplies? Or hunker down and wait for it to pass? Most of the time, given the unpredictability of the weather and the lack of space to carry appropriate healing items, any hint of rain meant that I just sat under cover waiting for it to pass. The unforgiving nature of death meant it just wasn’t worth the risk most of the time.

Despite all the flaws, I didn’t hate my time with SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada. It runs well enough in performance mode while looking reasonable and despite some of the worst audio I’ve heard in a long time, it’s largely unoffensive if you can get past its shortcomings.