Lone Echo II
Oct. 20th, 2021 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peeeeeeetLone Echo II finally came out with minimal fanfare. How is it? Not so great!
MILD SPOILERZ!!
Lone Echo was a revolutionary VR game. Playing a robot in zero gravity, the movement system was intuitive and not nauseating, and your ability to interact with your environment was straightforward and offered a rich involvement with the various parts of the game. It should have been VR's killer app, since it was one of the few major titles which simply wouldn't work as effectively outside of VR. But despite many people being stuck at home last year, VR never quite snowballed the way it deserved to. Now, the sequel four years in the making which was originally slated for 2019 comes out and reinforces the idea that the powers that be - Facebook, in this case, who bought out Oculus a while back - have lost interest in pushing the space into new territory.
So what we have is more of the same. The formula of the first game is adhered to closely. In the first phase, you and NPC Liv collaborate on restoring power to your outer space habitat. In the second, you venture outside to Saturn's rings on your own, mainly to do a bunch of side quests. In the third, you are still alone, in a cramped, hostile alien-infested environment. In the fourth, your reunite with Liv and attempt to heal her from the ailment that has debilitated her in the meantime. The above rundown fits both games so closely that you see several twists coming a mile away, though even if the formula did deviate, the basic plot of the sequel is such a sci-fi cliche that if you've watched any TV or films in the past forty years you've seen variations on it many times. The only major new character has potential, but the voice actor gives such a lazy, phoned in performance as to greatly reduce his effectiveness. I'm not saying the story is without any merit - the charming banter between Jack (you) and Liv remains believable and there are some touching interactions towards the end - but it's not worth waiting this long for.
None of which would matter if the gameplay was first class, and indeed, by changing almost nothing about it, the game is at least playable and fun for the most part. You do get a couple of new gadgets towards the end, but they're very much of the point-and-shoot variety. Combat is dreadful - there's only one type of enemy who poses any immediate threat, and its AI is literally "move in the direction of the nearest power source", making the various puzzles in the game pretty basic and quick to solve. The overall challenge is further reduced by characters prompting and hinting if you so much as take a few seconds to explore, experiment or get your bearings. Indeed, there seems to be a lot more chatter in this game; many times I was sat still waiting for dialogue to end so that I could move on to the next task (there's no shortcut), which in VR is a pretty boring thing to do. Don't get me wrong, I was engaged and happy through pretty much all of it, but after what a jaw-dropping, unforgettable experience the first game was, this was rather meh. It's as if, after releasing Sgt Pepper, the Beatles had gone away for four years and the album they came back with was 90% remixes of the Sgt Pepper tracks.
Well, I say engaged and happy; the final fly in the ointment was the game's performance. Now, I have a decent PC, with a graphics card that cost over £400 a few months ago, and yet I could only run it successfully at the lowest settings, and that was only *after* doubling the amount of RAM in my system. Prior to my RAM upgrade, I would frequently get meshes and textures that were *PS1* standard, frame rates that sometimes dropped to single-figures (and that is a *real* killer in VR), occasional crashes to desktop and frequent long loading scenes that triggered seemingly arbitrarily in the middle of gameplay. After the RAM upgrade, the frame rate was still lowish but playable, meshes and textures were still rather rudimentary by today's standards, and the loading interruptions and occasional crashes continued. At what point are the hardware requirements for a game so unrealistic as to make it unprofessional to release the game in that form?
So a big disappointment, then. Not an awful game, by any means, but a big nail in the coffin of current-gen VR, and that's a crying shame.
MILD SPOILERZ!!
Lone Echo was a revolutionary VR game. Playing a robot in zero gravity, the movement system was intuitive and not nauseating, and your ability to interact with your environment was straightforward and offered a rich involvement with the various parts of the game. It should have been VR's killer app, since it was one of the few major titles which simply wouldn't work as effectively outside of VR. But despite many people being stuck at home last year, VR never quite snowballed the way it deserved to. Now, the sequel four years in the making which was originally slated for 2019 comes out and reinforces the idea that the powers that be - Facebook, in this case, who bought out Oculus a while back - have lost interest in pushing the space into new territory.
So what we have is more of the same. The formula of the first game is adhered to closely. In the first phase, you and NPC Liv collaborate on restoring power to your outer space habitat. In the second, you venture outside to Saturn's rings on your own, mainly to do a bunch of side quests. In the third, you are still alone, in a cramped, hostile alien-infested environment. In the fourth, your reunite with Liv and attempt to heal her from the ailment that has debilitated her in the meantime. The above rundown fits both games so closely that you see several twists coming a mile away, though even if the formula did deviate, the basic plot of the sequel is such a sci-fi cliche that if you've watched any TV or films in the past forty years you've seen variations on it many times. The only major new character has potential, but the voice actor gives such a lazy, phoned in performance as to greatly reduce his effectiveness. I'm not saying the story is without any merit - the charming banter between Jack (you) and Liv remains believable and there are some touching interactions towards the end - but it's not worth waiting this long for.
None of which would matter if the gameplay was first class, and indeed, by changing almost nothing about it, the game is at least playable and fun for the most part. You do get a couple of new gadgets towards the end, but they're very much of the point-and-shoot variety. Combat is dreadful - there's only one type of enemy who poses any immediate threat, and its AI is literally "move in the direction of the nearest power source", making the various puzzles in the game pretty basic and quick to solve. The overall challenge is further reduced by characters prompting and hinting if you so much as take a few seconds to explore, experiment or get your bearings. Indeed, there seems to be a lot more chatter in this game; many times I was sat still waiting for dialogue to end so that I could move on to the next task (there's no shortcut), which in VR is a pretty boring thing to do. Don't get me wrong, I was engaged and happy through pretty much all of it, but after what a jaw-dropping, unforgettable experience the first game was, this was rather meh. It's as if, after releasing Sgt Pepper, the Beatles had gone away for four years and the album they came back with was 90% remixes of the Sgt Pepper tracks.
Well, I say engaged and happy; the final fly in the ointment was the game's performance. Now, I have a decent PC, with a graphics card that cost over £400 a few months ago, and yet I could only run it successfully at the lowest settings, and that was only *after* doubling the amount of RAM in my system. Prior to my RAM upgrade, I would frequently get meshes and textures that were *PS1* standard, frame rates that sometimes dropped to single-figures (and that is a *real* killer in VR), occasional crashes to desktop and frequent long loading scenes that triggered seemingly arbitrarily in the middle of gameplay. After the RAM upgrade, the frame rate was still lowish but playable, meshes and textures were still rather rudimentary by today's standards, and the loading interruptions and occasional crashes continued. At what point are the hardware requirements for a game so unrealistic as to make it unprofessional to release the game in that form?
So a big disappointment, then. Not an awful game, by any means, but a big nail in the coffin of current-gen VR, and that's a crying shame.
