REVIEW: ‘SYNDUALITY: Echo Of Ada’ Is A Painful Mecha Experience (PC)

SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada is Bandai Namco’s latest anime-inspired mecha extraction shooter. The game presents players with many seemingly engaging gameplay features and a shockingly attractive, atmospheric world with an interesting origin. Unfortunately, most of what could have been engaging and refreshing elements were executed poorly, tarnishing the overall experience in several disappointing ways.

Set in the land of Amasia in 2222, SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada takes place years after a mysterious poisonous rain called The Tears of the New Moon wiped out most of humanity and created ghoulish monsters known as Enders. These monsters now hunt the world. Due to this, humans are forced to live in underground caves for shelter. However, the state of the world has also birthed brave fighter nomads known as Drifters.

Armed with their mechs and accompanied by their agreeable and loyal humanoid AI companions known as Magus, Drifters scour their broken world, collecting a rare resource known as AO Crystals for survival and profit. The game puts you in the shoes of a Drifter as you try your best to survive the harsh world of Amasia while avoiding Enders, the mysterious toxic rain, and other bandit mech users.

SYNDUALITY almost goes out of the way to make gameplay tedious and miserable.

At its core, SYNDUALITY is a pretty simple extraction game. Players take on Requests or available missions, then hop in their mechs called CRADLECOFFINS or Cradles to go on Sorties, where you explore the ruins of Amasia. Some missions have you extract AO Crystals, as is standard for Drifters, while others ask for more specific tasks. These include killing a certain number of Enders, exploring and surveying ruins and locations, donating materials, and more.

However, while these missions are simple and direct, they quickly become repetitive due to their sheer lack of variety. What little variation there is in these missions is seen through changes in the number of enemies you’re hunting, which weapon you’re forced to use, or what item you have to acquire or donate. Additionally, while these missions are simple, they’re certainly not easy. Many elements in SYNDUALITY almost go out of their way to make your gameplay experience tedious and miserable.

Immediately upon starting your Sortie, you’ll have only about twenty minutes to complete your mission, depending on your Cradle’s battery life. And because you’re piloting a heavy vehicle, mobility will heavily depend on how advanced your mech is and how much load you carry.

Otherwise, you’ll be getting to your destination at a snail’s pace due to how many times you’ll stop for overheating. While this is standard in most mech games, the fact that you often have to search for where your objective is makes moving around miserable. Unfortunately, movement isn’t the only slow aspect of SYNDUALITY. Reloading weapons is painfully sluggish and, combined with limited movement, makes some combat scenarios needlessly challenging.

Furthermore, because it is an extraction game, players have to wait constantly between missions. Starting the extraction process takes about a minute, and actually ending a mission takes another thirty seconds. Again, while this is common for extraction shooters, SYNDUALITY’s unnecessary 30-second wait time when ending a mission adds an extra level of frustration and anxiety.

Defeat and crafting are equally frustrating and expensive.

Defeat and failure in SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada is not like other extraction shooters. Dying or failing to extract in time results in you losing everything, potentially even your Magus, if you fail to bail out of your mech in time. Almost everything means your mech, all your ammo, weapons, consumables, and basically everything you had in your inventory that you didn’t place in your tiny Safe Pocket, which is basically useless because it only holds things around the size of an ammo magazine. The game also gives players the option to insure some items before Sorties. However, currently, this system is basically a scam, especially early on, as the price of insuring items is sometimes more than the items themselves.

This wouldn’t be an issue if weapons and supplies were cheap and easy to come by, but they are quite the opposite. Most missions you accept in SYNDUALITY, especially within the game’s first half, don’t reward you enough money to buy a single gun. And while you can scramble together funds pretty quickly during Sorties, there’s always the risk of losing the materials you need to cash in, and the money can be better spent on other things. Because of this, having to constantly buy expensive weapons instead feels awful. In short, SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada forces players to be perfect Drifters, as a failure stops progress and sometimes reverses it.

Outside Sorties, players can upgrade their Garage by adding advanced facilities like a crafting station, a shop to buy equipment, a bathing station for your Magus, a wardrobe, and more. These facilities grant you more in-game options, such as more customization options and a way to craft some materials quickly without having to search for them.

Sadly, crafting these facilities takes a lot of time. You have to constantly go through the tedious experience of searching for the materials needed, sometimes multiple times, and most aren’t easily craftable. Not only that, but crafting them also takes real-life minutes, and if you want the process to go faster, you’ll have to use a lot of your hard-earned in-game money or some of your hard-earned real money.

It’s worth noting that SYNDUALITY costs $40. However, you’d think it was a free-to-play title due to its monetization model. Outside of forced timers, the game locks some customization options and the ability to fully change your Magus’ appearance behind a battle pass and premium currency. This wouldn’t be an issue if free customization options did not pale in comparison.

The worst part is that the game currently doesn’t have much content. There are only a few biomes, unique missions are limited, and so is special equipment. While players can unlock features like online co-op and the story mode, it takes a ridiculously long time and completing a lot of repetitive missions to achieve this.

SYNDUALITY features a shockingly beautiful world, but suffers PC performance issues.

All this isn’t to say that SYNDUALITY has no positive features. The game features a shockingly beautiful world, as biomes look breathtaking despite its post-apocalyptic setting. And trudging difficulty aside, when you learn the ins and outs of SYNDUALITY, it all clicks and becomes second nature to you. With enough time, you’ll master the map like the back of your hand, along with enemy placements, how to defeat them, what resources are useful, when to extract, and so much more.

Encountering other players on the field is at least one of the highlights of the game, as almost all players are incredibly friendly and helpful despite only being able to communicate using emotes. The world of Amasia may be cruel and cold, but meeting a friendly face is always nice. It’s just a shame that despite being an online multiplayer game, you cannot create rooms or even invite friends to your game—at least for now.

Unfortunately, SYNDUALITY’s PC version is spotty in terms of performance. Running the game on an RTX 3060TI, the recommended GPU, still presents several issues, including texture pop-ins throughout the game, constant framerate dips, and slight freezing here and there. While most of these issues are relatively unintrusive, the texture pop-ins are the worst of them. Hopefully, these issues can be ironed out with future updates.

While there is some fun to be had, SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada offers a mostly tedious experience in many ways. The gameplay is ridiculously arduous and painfully repetitive, the performance is barely acceptable, and its monetization model is questionable. It’d be in bad faith to recommend SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada to anime or extraction shooter fans, especially in its current state.