SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada is a game which makes a strong first impression before almost immediately nose-diving into humdrum monotony.

The bones of the setup are strong enough to support a good game. SYNDUALITY is an extraction shooter at its core, a PvPvE experience where players go on sorties to gather materials while fighting (or avoiding) AI-controlled monsters, random players, and the environment. After a successful sortie you go back to base to rearm and upgrade before heading back out again. It' s a simple and appealing gameplay loop that is like many other titles on the market.

The big hook that sets this apart from other titles is the central mech conceit, which is probably the game's strongest element. The Cradlecoffins look good, even from the over the shoulder third-person angle you inhabit. Everything has a good gamefeel, which is a bit generic but it is important nonetheless. The Cradlecoffins are not large enough to be in the same ballpark as the mechs from, say, Mobile Suit Gundam or Battletech. They are much closer in size to something from Votoms or Heavy Gear, a few meters from the ground and able to perform a range of normal human actions like fine motor work, jumping, etc. The movement and area traversal has a nice sense of weight without being slow – you can perform swifter movement like sliding across the ground at high speed, but at the cost of additional heat, which may force you to cool down. You can jump over small obstacles but can't climb sheer rock faces. You can turn to face new foes but you're not able to turn on a dime or flip and do acrobatics. To use more scientific terminology: the Cradlecoffins feel suitably chonky but not stompy.

The gunplay also feels pretty spot on, if a bit lightweight. The weapons come in all sorts of shapes, models, ammo types, and so on from typical shooter faire. Assault rifles, shotguns, sub-machine guns – you know the drill. But the reload speeds tend to feel a bit longer and more methodical, making how long you hold the trigger an important tactical decision as you might get jumped while putting in a fresh clip. The weapon effects are serviceable, but sadly they often lack the real oomph you'd want and expect given the heft of the Cradlecoffins themselves. The experience of actually shooting a target ends up being a rather hollow “watch the numbers dance while I hold left mouse” experience, which doesn't ruin the game, but does suck some of the fun out of the experience.

SYNDUALITY has a few other elements to spice up the experience. You use the Cradlecoffin's abilities to scan for nearby AO crystals, fight your way to them, then begin harvesting. The actual harvesting is pretty good as far as “click her to harvest minerals” actions go. There's a neat animation of the Cradlecoffin stabbing a drill into the crystal, and you can pan around with the camera to check for ambushers while you wait for the harvest to finish. Your Magus also helps the experience not feel so lonely, as they chatter with you during and between missions. The Magus is fully customizable in look, sound, and so forth, and also has a unique ability to use that works on a rather long charge time (mine could throw out barrier shields to provide cover). These things all add unique mechanical widgets to the core gameplay loop while also feeling well-couched in the setting's lore, helping the experience stand out from similar extraction shooters.

The enemies you face are something of a mixed bag. Other players are, as always, a complete variable as in any open PvE-enabled-but-not-mandated environment. Sometimes they will ambush you and strip you of parts, occasionally they will work alongside you to tackle a foe, or they may just use a friendly emote as you go your separate ways. In their absence you face occasional AI-controlled cradles, the monstrous Enders, and the environmental hazard of the toxic rain.

My experience with these elements was rather mixed and of course highly personal. Other players were the least interesting of the lot for me, as most of the time I didn't see that many other players during my Sorties. When I did find other players they mostly acted with immediate hostility, sometimes working in packs, and it was over before I had much of a chance or I was forced to flee on sight. I was hoping there would be more of a “feel it out” phase where both sides tried to determine if we could work together or not, but mostly I found emptiness or hostility as the default options.

The enders were a bit better in practice but substantially duller in impact. The Enders have very little personality in my opinion, looking like a motley collection or random scifi monsters that don't have many distinguishing features beyond how many I needed to kill for a given mission. Their attacks, body language, and presence all seemed to be perfunctory.

The hazardous rainfall has a more distinct impact, but not always in a good way. On the one hand, the acid rain does stand out because it is an environmental hazard with an intuitive solution. You can either risk the health of your machine and run through the rain, watching your environmental coating bar deplete, or you can take cover under an overhang, beneath a crumbled structure, within a cave or bunker, etc. There's no special explanation needed really: SYNDUALITY tells the player “The rain hurts you” and gives you opportunities to pull out your umbrella or seek cover, as it were. This adds another concern as you play as you can never predict when the weather will shift, so you always have an eye out for any nearby coverings to duck under should the rain start.

The problem is that this mechanic doesn't always make for the most engaging gameplay. Sometimes the rain starts and you hunker down in an area with nothing to scavenge, no enemies to fight, and nothing to really, well, do. These gameplay dead spots can be brief, but often they overstay their welcome and I ended up running through the rain because I got bored. Another bit that kicked me out of the world (though this might not affect others) was that the weather resistance bar and the health bar are separate measures with separate repair kits. At first this seems fine, but when you take physical damage it seems a bit odd that you wouldn't also lose weather resistance in some way. If a laser or shell fired at high velocity hit the mech, wouldn't it affect the outer finish in some way? For a game which is ostensibly going for a sort of real robot aesthetic, it's either a curious oversight or a gameplay-over-realism decision that never settled right with me – though I admit that's a nitpick perhaps for me alone, and a minor one.

The visuals are a bit more mixed. For what the game is going for, everything seems to work as intended. The Cradlecoffins look terrific in terms of detail on the armor and weapons, how they move and the like, and this goes for the players and the AI Cradlecoffins obviously. But the Enders – in theory your primary enemies – look awfully generic and are not particularly interesting to look at. Not to mention the environments, while fine in motion, really show their issues when you scrutinize them for extended periods of time. That would be fine in a constant high-octane run and gun game, but the rainfall mechanic basically forces you to hunker down for stretches where you have to pause and look around a bit, making it that much easier to notice flaws or less than stellar presentation.

But the real egregious issues here are the game's macro structure and shallowness.

In between missions you have a whole host of activities to engage in. You will sell items for scrap, purchase new gear and ammo, repair and remodel rooms in your base, upgrade kit, all sorts of things. It has all the features that you would expect from a scavenger mech game with lots of tacticool real robot gear to fidget with. This is the area where the more insidious – and monotonous – aspects of the game arise.

I got my first real taste of it when remodeling my base. An early task is to gather materials on a mission so that you can repair a room back at base. I gathered the materials, activated the remodel, and then a timer popped up – the remodel would be complete in 9 seconds, with a timer counting down. Sitting alone in my home I said the words “Ugh, mobile game,” aloud to no one in particular, and slowly but surely my fears were realized. SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada may be a solidly good time when fighting on the ground, but under the surface it is stuffed to the gills with microtransactions, battle passes, currencies, and more.

On the one hand, it's par for the course these days even for full-priced releases to have all these additional monetization elements and non-stop grind mechanics. But just because it's the norm doesn't make it any less bearable or, let's face it, fun. You are inundated with scraps and bits and bobbles, ever-increasing costs for upgrades that produce further grind, and on and on it goes. And this is all after you've paid to play in the first place – a $39.99 price tag which is not the most expensive bracket on the market, but not exactly a budget title either. Battle passes and wait times on repairs and sorting through giant inventories full of filler junk… look, these are not problems unique to SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada. But these practices being present to this degree in a game people have already paid to play feels excessive to me.

Additionally, the positive first impression quickly gives way to monotony. There are only two maps at present, and the apparent depth of the initial gameplay seems promising but even a dozen hours or so later the experience felt painfully similar. Run the same missions on the same maps over and over and over again just to unlock another tier of the battle pass… I'd honestly rather not. This model of repeated actions on similar environments can work if the quality is there – I've certainly enjoyed such games in my time – but usually for some combination of meaningful extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. In the time I spent with SYNUALITY Echo of Ada I never found it that fulfilling, just mindless sorties on repeat where I kept hoping for tense standoffs with tough choices in the wasteland but often found more bundles of random drops to go stuff in a locker back at the base.

It's hard to review a live service multiplayer game in any true capacity. On a long enough timeline perhaps the game will find its footing, add in more meaningful content to flesh out the experience, and draw in enough new players to keep it interesting. Or, perhaps more likely, SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada shares the fate of many other live service titles and has a brief moment in the sun before players shift their attention to some other game and the player population death spiral commences. The game has a few bright spots that might make early adopters hopeful, like the interesting mecha theming on an extraction shooter chassis with decent enough gameplay. But I think that it has an eye-watering amount of monetization features, a shallow gameplay loop, and a not insignificant up front cost makes it far more likely that SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada a title whose days are already numbered.