Booth babes, autism and kamikazes! Review

Booth babes, autism and kamikazes!

I don’t think anyone dons the mask of disappointment more often than the online

video game critic. If the impending doom of layoffs or the forever-shattered

dreams of a night spent smothered in booth babes doesn’t get you, then the good

old-fashioned shabby programming in all its myriad forms will.

Two months shy of a year ago, I previewed an incredibly promising space flight

game titled Echelon (brought to us by Bethesda Software). This game boasted

vast open vistas, hassle-free Crimson Skies

type gameplay and gorgeous, epic aerial battles. And to some degree, the final

version delivers just that. Unfortunately, the good moments are packed tightly

within too many bad ones. Kinda like when you ask what your blind-date looks

like, but all you hear is how nice she is and all the charity work she’s done.

Echelon opens with a decent cinema sequence bringing the player up to

date with the game’s 300 year history. In the far flung future, humans

do battle with a lost offshoot of humanity, the Vellians, who have mutated into

humanoid beasties (nothing gelatinous or gaseous or anything interesting) by

the alien technology that they have been handling. You are a pilot whose job

it is to shoot down as many of these Vellians as you can. And that’s that. The

plot gets no points for originality.

The story is vast but fails to incorporate the player at all. All missions

have to be finished successfully or you are forced to repeat them, and there

is no in-game save. This is annoying to no end because the Echelon interface

was obviously designed by an autistic person, what with all the clicking.

When a mission ends, successfully or not, you are required to press the Escape

key, which takes you to the ‘End Mission: Yes or No’ screen which in turns necessitates

clicking the Back button through 2 or 3 more screens. Now you are ready to once

again pick your ship, outfit it and start the current missions again or proceed

to the next one (depending if you win or lose) once the game has loaded…yet

again. Whatever happened to the Restart Mission button or the Next Mission button?

It’s just unnecessarily tedious and really pulls you out of the game.

There is a bit of branching within a mission by virtue of different goals,

the fullfillment of which lead to different missions. With 52 missions in all,

there’s some nice variety here. But due to the branching you only wind up playing

about 40 of those, and they’re all pretty run of the mill. Fly to an indicated

waypoint, dispatch indicated enemies or escort indicated friendlies. Standard,

boring and ubiquitous – the missions fit all these descriptions. I’ll let you

pick one.

The graphics, on the other hand, are a great deal better than average. Since

all the battles take place within the atmosphere, virtual pilots are blessed

with beautiful, open mountainous areas with deep narrow canyons that are great

fun for fast and furious aerial chases. Think Death

Star trench run from Star Wars and you’ve got the right idea. The solar

effects are amazing and can actually hinder your visibility, which is really

cool. Bright light! Bright light!

Detailed textures, bump-mapping and appropriate light sourcing are all here

in vivid splendor. Low flying crafts adequately kick up dust or water to produce

a nice effect. And when things blow up, they really blow up.

The ship design is fantastic and imaginative with big, bulbous cockpits (I

can’t believe I just wrote that) that contain visible pilots. Ships come in

two flavors: planes and hovercrafts. The former include really fast fighters,

bombers and an escort ship, while the latter is relatively new to flying games.

These interesting and highly maneuverable hovercrafts are an amalgam of helicopter

type control and lateral propulsion. The end result produces cat-like agility

and a tighter turning radius. These are the ships of choice for those low flying

trench and canyon runs.

Click to enlarge!

Some of the battles are really fun and action packed, but most are rather dry,

requiring pilots to travel long, uneventful distances to get to the fray. Echelon

does offer a time acceleration option to speed things up, but why are the long

drawn out flying sessions even in the game if they serve no purpose? Odd!

Another odd bit is the overall AI. Often pilots (including friendly ones) will

re-enact World War II Japanese Kamikaze runs. These sacrifices are by no means

intentional, however, as this has been labeled a soon-to-be-patched bug. But

for now it’s incredibly annoying to have a fellow teammate collide head-on with

you.

Couple that with no in-game save and the nefarious interface, and minor grievances

quickly becomes rancorous detest. And don’t leave your craft on auto-pilot for

too long, because the on-board computer may just send you careening into a mountain

side. I don’t need any dumb computer to assist me with that. I have crashing

down to a science already.

But the biggest and most unforgivable faux pas Echelon brings to (or

rather, omits from) the discerning gamer is horrible multiplayer support. There

is no network setup with a list of servers to join. Instead, the folks at Buka

Entertainment would rather have you scouring the Echelon site looking

for IP addresses posted by potential players. Do you know how hard it is to

coordinate a multiplayer game with just one other gamer, not to mention seven?

If you can get it going, Deathmatch and Co-op modes in a variety of game types

(including Capture The Fort) await the determined online player. But good luck.

When it’s all said and done, Echelon is a disappointment. I expected

your character to play a more integral role in the story. No such luck. I expected

better AI from a game that has been in development for this long. Nope. Add

to that the uninteresting missions and lack of multiplayer support and you wind

up with a game that was released just a few moons too early.