The number of games I know that have made the transition from a mobile platform to the PC is vanishingly small. Primarily this is due to the limitations of the mobile platform that necessitates simplicity in almost all respects, something that is at odds with the expectations of gamers of other platforms. Some do make the jump, indeed they can even be quite palatable if some effort is given to the transition, however their roots are always indisputable with the trade mark multiplicities baked into the very core of the game. Echo Prime, a new title from Robot Entertainment who are behind the Orcs Must Die! series, is a textbook example of a game with a primary platform in mind that suffers when translated elsewhere.
You’re an elite enforcer on a quest to protect the galaxy from an alien threat. During an engagement with the enemy however your ship becomes damaged and drifts slowly towards a black hole. However this black hole is actually a tear between this universe and the wider multiverse allowing you to establish a link with a race of beings called the Echoes. This link grants you abilities far beyond that of any normal human, enabling you to protect the galaxy from the imminent alien threat. From then on its up to you to fight your way through untold hordes of enemies ranging from robots gone awry all the way up to massive alien commanders, ready to squash you without a second thought.
As is the case with all mobile ports the graphics of Echo Prime are incredibly simplistic, done so that it can run on the widest range of devices possible. There’s no option to crank them up to ridiculous levels on the PC unfortunately, so you just end up with the same thing running at a larger resolution. This means it runs well but honestly there’s rarely enough happening on screen to stress even a decade old PC, even if you try to do something silly like run through the whole level to bunch up all the enemies together (there’s rarely more than 20, total, in a level). This makes it somewhat obvious that the target market was most certainly not the PC and more on the mobile market.
Echo Prime is a hack ‘n’ slash time waster with every level being no longer than a couple minutes long and you never being swamped with more than a handful of enemies at once. There’s 2 basic forms of combat the first being a simple ranged attack that you can spam by holding down. The second is a melee attack that you’ll automatically switch to when enemies are in range. The enemies you’ll face are just about as varied with them being designated as either melee or ranged and acting accordingly. If this isn’t sounding incredibly nuanced to you then you’d be right on the money as it’s catered more towards spamming attacks, either kind will do, than any kind of meaningful strategy.
It became clear early on that the AI in the game is rudimentary, to the point where I’m sure that the path finding algorithm is a straight “walk directly at the player” for 90% of the enemies. Whilst there are some elements of strategy that you can potentially take advantage of (environmental hazards like oil slicks and toxic gas) you likely won’t need them once you figure out that you can shoot nearly every enemy before they get on screen. This is because enemies are placed all over the level before you start and will remain there until their either hit with a projectile or they come within a certain range of you (which, you’ll note, is after you can see them).
This is not to say that playing a true melee character wouldn’t be viable, it certainly is given the fact that melee weapons are usually an order of magnitude more powerful. Consequently if you’re a classical min-maxer like myself you’ll quickly learn that there’s no need to buy any weapon but the very best you can for your level bracket. The first time doing this is a little bit of a struggle (time wise more than anything else) but after that you’re pretty much guaranteed to waste any enemy near you without having to think about it. This means that the challenge of the game is almost non-existent, removing any sense of driving purpose to improve on your character.
I will admit that the Echo system is pretty cool, allowing you to choose from an incredibly massive range of augmentations to spice up the game play. Better still you’re allowed to choose one from another player to use for that campaign, something which can lead to awfully broken builds like my double-double shot build which could spawn upwards of 20 bullets with a single click. This also sends back credits and upgrade points to the people you borrowed them from, encouraging you to upgrade your Echoes fully in order to have them picked before anyone elses. Unfortunately once you find a build you’re comfortable with you’re quite unlikely to stray from it, even if you happen to borrow an Echo that has some cool abilities.
It’s painfully obvious that the whole game is designed for fat fingering on a tablet screen with all the buttons being huge and all the controls having touch centric ideals built into them. This works horribly on PC with the dodge function detecting “swipes” all the time, often leading your character to dive in a direction that you didn’t expect them to. Worse still the large collision radius used for the cursor can mean that you sometimes end up clicking on things that you can’t see, like when you’re clicking on the edge of the screen to move forward. It’s highly frustrating to use and the game’s simplicity is its saving grace in this regard as any kind of twitch reaction is nigh on impossible.
The story is incredibly basic, being told primarily through small chunks of text before the mission begins. It’s little more than a bit of flavour text as it often doesn’t amount to much more than “You need to clear this place out” or “We need to defend this because of X”. Indeed past the initial set up the story seems to be a second thought something which is entirely a symptom of the game’s design to be picked up, played for 5~10 minutes, and then put away. This might be passable on a mobile device but in a PC title it really doesn’t cut it.
Echo Prime is a perfect example of why straight ports of a mobile game are just not compatible with the PC platform. The simplistic graphics, pick up/put down nature and extreme simplicity is perfectly suited to a platform where those things are key but when brought to the PC it just feels cheap. The idea has a lot of potential and I believe that Robot Entertainment could make a great version of it for the PC, however this current incarnation is far from that, showing its mobile roots almost too proudly. For PC gamers I’d rethink buy this on your PC as it’d be much better suited to your phone or gaming tablet.
Rating: 4.0/10
Echo Prime is available on PC and iOS right now for $9.99 and $5.49 respectively. Game was played on the PC with 4 hours total play time and 25% of the achievements unlocked.
