SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada is a tedious and over-designed extraction shooter

★★ | Titanfail

Reviewed on: PC (Steam)
Distributor provided a review copy.

In theory, SYNDUALITY should do everything that I look for in a niche title like this. It’s an extraction shooter, a genre that I can’t get enough of at the moment. It has mechs, something that I’ve loved since I was a child. And it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world reminiscent of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime favorite.

Yet, despite all these elements, almost nothing in SYNDUALITY comes together in a way that works. In its current form, it’s a clunky, almost dated experience that works hard to prevent the player from actually having fun.

Story & Gameplay

Hundreds of years into the future, a cataclysmic event of toxic rain destroyed the world as we know it. In the aftermath, humans are forced to live underground, and the ruins of past civilizations are plagued by creatures called Enders. To combat them, humanity has created a force of warriors called Drifters, who can command mechs in their voyages to the world above.

It wouldn’t be an anime-inspired fare if these mechs didn’t come with an AI companion, here called The Magus. Armed with enough firepower to occupy a small nation and their omniscient AI buddy, players set out to scavenge valuable artifacts from the hands of Enders and other Drifters out for an easy score.

On top of that, the world itself poses its own dangers as the climate can turn unpredictable at any given turn.

After a quick tutorial, you’re thrust into the main game. The mechanics are surprisingly easy to learn, despite the excessive amount of terminology the game pushes on you in the first hours. Each mission is under a half hour long, giving you just enough time to push further into the landscape as you get more comfortable with your skills.

Sadly, compared to other mech-titles, SYNDUALITY lacks the weighty and punchy fun that something like Titanfall delivers in spades. Your mech, at least based off the testing period, is a clunky and heavy beast that never feels fun to pilot. It’s nowhere near the overkill of Armored Core, nor the biblical insanity of Steel Battalion. Instead, SYNDUALITY sits in the odd void between flimsy and clumsy.

Part of that has to do with the extraction mechanics. In other titles, like Escape From Tarkov, it makes sense that you have to wait for an exit or find places to hide in a hostile environment. The whole point is that you’re a squishy, easily disposed human. But when piloting a mech, that same waiting around quickly feels tedious. Especially as most of the missions are focused around it.

Combat, when it does happen, is similarly routine. Enemies have varying sizes of health bars, and usually fights turn into matches of who can bullet sponge the most. Fighting against other players is mostly a game of paying to win, as the matchmaking usually put me into fights with more experienced and higher level combatants. This proves annoying, as the game punishes you for every failure by taking away everything you brought into the mission.

The result is a gameplay loop that’s punishing for the sake of being punishing instead of offering an opportunity to play out a power fantasy like you’d expect from a mech.

Accessibility

Sadly, the accessibility settings are barebones.

The usual basics are there. You can adjust volume, display settings, and the POV. The third-person camera angle is quite welcome, as it makes the combat in a mech more palatable than a first-person point of view would have.

Apart from all of that, there’s very little else to write home about.

Who’s It For?

SYNDUALITY is an odd game to release at this time. It tries to cash in on the extraction shooter craze, but it’s coming in way too late with far too little to make any kind of an impact. It isn’t a full mech game, nor is it a hardcore simulation. The PVP mechanics are a burden, as the balancing between players is completely off at the present. The super punishing difficulty and losing everything upon death only makes the gameplay loop aggressively tedious instead of challenging.

In short, SYNDUALITY needs to take a long, hard look at itself and ask what does it want to be, and how will it get there. Right now, it’s not worth the asking price, especially with all the micro-transactions still found in the game. But maybe, after some updates and potentially a free-to-play model in place, SYNDUALITY emerges a better, more thought-out product.

For now, it’s just not it.