1/28/2024 0 Comments Lone echo steam release“For the first time ever, I truly felt like I was in space, an experience only made possible with the power of virtual reality.”įor those curious about Lone Echo’s length, my playthrough took me a good six hours – and that’s without stopping to enjoy the sights. It’s a two-hour long maze that feels like what should’ve been a 15-minute segment – a real shame when you consider how brilliant the rest of the game is. The mission objectives also grow repetitive, most of which involve cutting open a door, pushing a button, and recharging a battery. To make matters worse, the environment is dark and indistinctive, making it outright difficult to figure out where you’re supposed to go. This forces you to unlearn the push-and-pull-on-objects movement system that you’ve now grown accustomed to, and instead rely solely on your wrist-thrusters to get around. Without going into spoilers, Lone Echo trades in its survival story in favor of full-on Sci-Fi, and things suddenly turn into a game of The Floor Is Lava, where physical contact with nearly all surfaces result in instant death. Act three, however, is a different story. Act one has you poking around Krono II, and act two even offers you a degree of freedom to explore outer space and tackle missions in the order you see fit. The majority of Lone Echo’s campaign is amazing. Ready At Dawn has created a level of detail rarely seen in a game, and that’s certainly an achievement worth celebrating. Also impressive is your scanner, which is capable of pulling up pages of information on every visible material. Everything behaves as you’d expect them to in the real world. There’s even a model RC space shuttle you can fly. Sure, there’s no point in creating more space debris, but being able to pull open lockers and whack balls across the ship with a baseball bat adds a whole new layer of immersion. Remember the Oculus Touch demo, First Contact, where all in-game object could be grabbed and thrown around? Lone Echo does the same thing, only across the entire game. The view of Saturn from the command deck is guaranteed to make your jaw drop. From the wiring in your robot arms to Captain Rhodes’ subtle facial expressions, to the random notes scattered around Kronos II, the attention to detail is simply astounding. Of course, virtual reality immersion also requires great visuals – Lone Echo has that covered too. I kept playing ‘just five more minutes’, not to discover the secret behind the mysterious space anomaly, but because I wanted to know what happens to Jack and Captain Rhodes. As a result, you naturally become invested in Captain Rhodes’ well-being – which is Lone Echo’s ingenious way of maintaining the stakes in a survival story where the protagonist cannot die (Jack simply respawns in a new body). The game also takes advantage of the contrast between Jack’s robotic nature and Captain Rhodes’s easygoing attitude to deliver lots of humor. Thanks to some excellent voice acting, all of these interactions – from the light-hearted teasing to a simple high five – feel real. Put a hand on her face and she’ll brush you off and say something witty. Raise the peace sign and she flashes one right back. When you interact with Captain Rhodes, she reacts. Right from the start, you get the sense that they are people who have grown to care deeply for one another over their time in space. Despite the clichéd setup, Lone Echo stands out from similar Sci-Fi stories by shining the spotlight on Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes.
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