SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada PC Review 2/10 "Let the record show I have no beef with free-to-play games" 💥 @SYNDUALITY_GAME @synduality

Let the record show I have no beef with free-to-play games. If a game is riddled with microtransactions, paid-for cosmetics, and has a season pass built into it, but also allows you to play without forking out any money upfront that’s a deal I’m willing to take. Fortnite manages it, Genshin Impact has done very well, and Marvel Rivals is enjoying justified success.

All of which means I’m fully prepared to forgive SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada for its sins, because - oh, uh, hang on, I’m getting passed up a note. Uh-huh. Huh. Oh. Oh no. OH NO. What do you mean it costs £35.00?! That can’t be right!

Sadly this is indeed the case. Despite looking like a free-to-play game, walking like a free-to-play game, and quacking like a free-to-play game, SYNDUALITY is a regular retail release, and this simple fact pretty much obliterates any fun that can be squeezed out of the experience.

Set in the year 2222, SYNDUALITY is set in a post-post-apocalyptic world. What we recognize as civilization was destroyed when a mysterious “blue rain” - the Tears of the New Moon - fell from the skies, forcing mankind into a giant shielded underground city. That too was destroyed, leaving the survivors (that’s you!) to eke out a lonely existence scavenging from the world above. With the surface still dealing with skin-melting weather and various glowing monsters, you’re given a mech and tasked with collecting crystals. Along for the ride is your Magus, an AI helper who’ll provide information and companionship on your journey.

At its core, this is an extraction shooter with survival elements. The gameplay loop is outfitting your mech, venturing into the wilderness, gathering items, returning to base, upgrading your mech and base, and repeat.

The primary wrinkle is the other players also on the hunt for resources. Encountering another person will go two ways: either you both wave to each other and continue with your expedition, or one chooses to engage in combat to steal the other’s stuff. Adding a layer of consequences to the mix is that if your mech is destroyed in the field you lose it, all your equipment, and every item you’re holding, making defeat a truly depressing setback.

On paper, this sounds like a satisfying balance of risk and reward, almost a game theory-style social experiment to see whether strangers will cooperate or betray one another. In practice, it’s a griefer’s paradise. Let’s zero in on one thing that happened to not only me but to many unhappy early-access players on Steam.

As a reviewer I was lucky enough to be sent a code for the “Ultimate Edition”, ordinarily priced at (wait for it…) £85. This came with the DAISYOGRE mech, which is leagues better than the starting mechs in the game. So, naturally, I equipped it and headed straight into the field. Two minutes later I was staring at a pile of smoking wreckage that was once my new mech, as griefers are specifically targeting the pre-order mechs for destruction. There’s no retrieving or respawning it, it’s gone.

I didn’t pay for my copy so I wasn’t that upset, but take a peek at the Steam reviews to see the gobsmacked reactions from those who forked out for early access, only to have their shiny pre-order bonus yanked away from them before they even figured out how to play the game. In a way, I respect the developers for sticking to their philosophy that defeat is a serious loss, but it’s a brutal kick in the teeth and a terrible first impression to watch something you paid real money for go up in smoke.

Beyond that, the game is an awkwardly stitched-together Frankensteinian monster, with obvious free-to-play elements crudely bolted onto a retail game. Why, for example, after painstakingly collecting the items necessary to upgrade the walls of my base do I need to wait 17 minutes for the process to complete (or pay to speed up the construction timer)? Why do I need to buy (with real money) a “ticket” to alter the appearance of my Magus buddy?!

The game’s core economy is also a real headscratcher. For example, each trip out to the wilderness will net you crystals and you’ll make at least 3000-4000 currency per sortie. You can use that currency to buy health packs from the in-game shop for 100 currency each. Alternatively, you can craft health packs by hunting down 5 “green beryls” in the world, a process that took me about half an hour. Feed those into the crafting machine (which, natch, you have to craft first), wait three minutes and out pops a health pack. Why would I go through this tedious crafting rigamarole when I can just buy a health pack for a pittance?

There’s also the extremely limited inventory. Being able to store a maximum of 100 items at a base sounds like a lot, but you’ll hit the limit very quickly and it’s impossible to know what’s safe to sell. Upgrading your base requires multiples of various crafting components and you can’t see what the next tier will require, so you might sell your stock of cooling fins, upgrade your floor, and then discover the next tier requires four of them. I can accept in a survival game you need a limit to how many items your character can carry, but your base too?

At this point, it’s worth asking what exactly the £35 retail price is buying you. It’s certainly not a gripping narrative, as after a week and a half of playing the game every night I didn’t see a single cutscene. The trailers indicate there is a story and cutscenes, but despite diligently clearing my requests and doing what the game told me, nothing happened.

That £35 is also not buying you a graphical tour-de-force. There’s a broad aesthetic similarity to Sony’s Horizon series in the overgrown world, rusting weapons from a past war, and eerie monsters prowling the wilderness, but SYNDUALITY’s world is never particularly attractive, well thought-out or dynamic and there’s some seriously dowdy lo-res texture work throughout. The mechs themselves aren’t anything to write home about either, being essentially a box with limbs whose paint jobs you can’t even customize.

SUMMARY

SYNDUALITY’s one saving grace is that the third-person exploration isn’t terrible. Sure your mech lumbers around slowly and overheats at the drop of a hat if you boost, but the moment-to-moment action is broadly compelling, especially the tension when you’re figuring out if another player is going to stab you in the back or not.

But that one slice of enjoyment only makes the rest of the experience that much more baffling. I can only assume that this was once intended to be free-to-play, only for some bean counter to decide it was worth rolling the dice on selling it at retail. Well, the result is everything you hate about free-to-play games, but this time you’re paying to hate it! 

My advice: wait a few months and I can almost guarantee it will be free-to-play.

But in its present form? Ew.

2/10

💦MELTED💦