SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada Review

Mecha and anime girls are as complementary as a night out to a greasy kebab. You usually cannot have one without the other, Armored Core being one of the exceptions. To illustrate the fact, SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada takes it in strides.

SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada is set a few centuries in the future where humanity lives underground after the Earth suffers a cataclysm. Over time, volatile creatures emerged with energy-fueled crystals littering the wasteland of dilapidated structures. You pilot a heavy mech called a CRADLECOFFIN, accompanied by a customised, anime-designed specialist called a Magnus, to enter the above world to collect materials like the energy crystals used to sustain life below. In-game, the job of running a CRADLECOFFIN is sought after, accompanied with a ton of informative promotional videos shown to the player as a way of quickly explaining lore with tips for playing, like the PvP modes that I hadn’t run into as of writing. Not to say I hadn’t tried: I got the prompt that people could enter my game, so I stayed around the map for a bit after completing the objectives. It just didn’t occur.

The third-person extraction gameplay is quite unforgiving, pushing you into the fray once the tutorial is completed. In the first mission, the simple objective of collecting three shards before taking the elevator back home ended up taking me three tries as the basic weapon equipped can take down an average “Chaser” (the name of the basic dog enemy), but the green version happens to do double damage. I learnt this as I was nearly one-hit KO’d before being finished off by a weaker enemy who flanked my rear. Once defeated, you have a few seconds to press a combination of buttons to get your Magnus out of the mech before it blows up, losing all of your equipment and mech in the process.

After the game took pity on me by restoring my original mech, I was able to complete missions without any resistance. The two maps to choose from, northern and southern, can be described as all the types of biomes you can have mushed together so everyone is happy. Lush forests of trees next to arid, rocky ranges are more common areas you hang out in, but I’ve seen a bit of snow on the map. Old man-made installations and the occasional caves litter the region, brimming with resources used to craft/upgrade your mech and HQ. Besides enemies, the weather also plays as an antagonist, damaging your CRADLECOFFIN, forcing you to find shelter. My run ended when I was ambushed again by a green chaser and failed to hit the correct buttons for ejection, killing both in the process. 

The game then crashed, which had the adverse effect of a cutscene where the dirt-covered Magnus burst through the shop door reclaiming, “Well, that could have gone better.” While I hadn’t unlocked the showers (the only way to clean off any muck) as I hadn’t progressed enough, she was muddy for the rest of the game. Since I no longer had a mech that I stocked with useful ammo and kits, the game again gave me another mech with a shotgun that did somewhat better damage. After each mission, you get a play-by-play of what — and how — you did before a list of the amount of material you collected is tallied. Then, once in the workshop/garage, you can sell off unwanted items, buy more ammo and repair kits, claim rewards from guild missions, using collected materials for your workstation. The hub also lets you buy the season pass and dress the Magnus in found or bought clothing of your choice. 

While there’s a lot to like about SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada, the game isn’t exactly doing anything worth writing about. The info-videos in the style of rubber-hose animation, the challenge of even succeeding in a mission, and the world-building are the only things that kept playing, but it quickly became repetitive, leading to me beginning to play less incrementally (which is good if you’re needing to post a review ASAP). It could have also been my progress being stumped by the constant failing and loss of material, which in turn had me going in circles half the time.

If you’re a fan of the series Lost Planet, you’ll find a lot of the spirit and energy-focussed storylines in SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada, just set in anywhere other than a planet-sized Siberia.