There Came an Echo

I really enjoyed it all the way thru. Although it is a short game, it really keeps you captivated to play the entire time.

And I absolutely loved the credits. This might be the first game I actually sat through and watches the entire credits.

Iridium Studios' previous game, Sequence (now renamed Before the Echo), is the only game I have ever purchased twice from different suppliers because I had such a blast playing it. So it's fair to say that I didn't go into There Came an Echo with zero expectations: I was hoping for another game from the same indie developers that would hit me in a similar way. Something fresh and innovative, an engaging background narrative with a bit of zaniness, casual gameplay but a bit challenging, colourful and cool aesthetics. All the stuff that appealed to me so much with Sequence. And to that end this is my first review on Steam.

The Positives

The Not-So-Positives

Overall

One more cinematic lemon pretending to be a game.

Opening credits are a good clue that the thing tries to be a movie, albeit with rudimentary animation and a flow constantly broken by loading screens.
Furthermore, unlike an actual movie but very much like failed software, none of the cinematic garbage can be skipped.
I couldn't take more than 30 minutes of it.
Of which 5 minutes at best were spent playing.
If you can call play a challenge that is entirely due to over-complicated controls, to impractical input.
Gamepad is supposed to replace audio input when your voice is out of the recognition module's league, yet no gamepad button acts when a response is urgent.
In such moments, the mouse does react to the radial menu clicks, yet easily sends the wrong on-screen command.

By the way, a support character tells you what to tell the main character, instead of her telling him directly. That's for the quality of the writing.

Ambitious, but ultimately flawed. It feels like they spent all their budget on voice actors (who do a great job), and didn't spend enough effort refining their control schemes. Voice controls rarely work, mouse controls are tedious. View is way too zoomed in as well, leading to constantly scrolling the camera very slowly for such a fast-paced game. I quit at mission 8 where I was forced to split my party into 3 and kept accidentally sending all units to locations.

This game desperately needs to let you skip cut-scenes. The game is very story heavy and having to re-watch the same scenes play out every time you retry is tedious. Even in missions the game is constantly taking away your control.

If you are not native or super perfect speaker of supported languages don't play this game. Voice commands work less than half of the time. There is no option to see how the game understands the commands, so adding custom commands is pointless. I've used in the background speech to text software that some commands translated spot on, but the game did not register them. There is an option to manually command units, but farther in the game theye are super inefficient (Mission 8 is the prime example).

Make sure the game understands you as soon as you've bought it. If it doesn't, return it before it's too late.

The game gives you the option to make a custom command. Unfortunately you have to write it instead of recording it, so whether the game can understand your pronunciation of your custom command or not, probably, depends on a combination of whether it already understands you and luck (or a lot of work, I guess).

A fun and very different experience, I enjoyed it, only took a little over 3 hours or so. Story is a bit trope-ish and weird, but not in the way. I'd recommend it more for the gameplay experience. Lots of potential to build on from this studio, hope we see more from them.

Frustrations make up 80% of my experience playing this game.

Unskippable cutscenes at the beginning of every mission start and at almost every checkpoint, coupled with glitched checkpoint reload are a bad combo. Add in inconsistent voice recognition, and the inavailability of manual saves to the mix, and you'll have the perfect recipe for frustrations and a huge waste of time.

There Came an Echo has potential. The story is great and interesting, and the voice acting is top notch. These are its draws, you don't play this game for the gameplay, which is below average if I'm being honest, but like I said, that shouldn't matter because it's not its draw. Voice command is the game's main highlight. Without that, gameplay-wise it's a simple and straightforward strategy game with scripted levels. Unfortunately, the voice command is so inconsistent, and the frustration it causes drowns everything else.

Cutscenes make up a huge bulk of the game's length, most of them being in-game cutscenes. And they are unskippable. To make matters worse, you have to sit through them everytime the game reloads a checkpoint. There is no manual save. If you fail a mission, you reload to your last checkpoint. If you quit before finishing a chapter, you play the chapter from the very beginning.

And to make matters even worse, I've experienced glitches when the game reloads a checkpoint. One such glitch was the enemies not being there. I wasn't able to move forward, and there's no option to reload the checkpoint. The only way to reload a checkpoint is to fail an objective, such as being caught during stealth missions, or having your whole team wiped out. But since there were no enemies there, I had to choice but to restart the ENTIRE mission, and sit through more cutscenes,

And the cutscenes are no joke. Many of them last for minutes long.

The voice recognition system is very inconsistent. English isn't my first language, but I speak it as much as the sum of other languages I speak, so I think I'm pretty decent. Sometimes the voice recognition gets along well with me, sometimes it doesn't. More often than not, whenever I restart a mission, the voice recognition system acts like it doesn't even recognize me anymore. I'm not sure whether it's upset because of my tone, or its Alzheimer is acting up.

It's unfortunate. Really. The story and voice acting are great, but what's the point if you barely pay attention to them anymore once the game gets more and more frustrating as it progresses. Like I said, gameplay-wise it's a simple and straightforward strategy game with scripted levels.

I'm very difficult to frustrate, and honestly I don't think that's a good thing. I've stayed in toxic PvP games longer than I should have, and I very much regret having too much patience instead of quitting them earlier. But this game somehow made my chest hurt from anger, not even 2 hours in.

Highly unrecommended.

There Came an Echo is a real-time tactical combat game with a gimmick (voice input control). There is a transhumanist science-fiction plot going on, but the game is too short to make the best out of it. Controls are hit-and-miss, both the voice recognition and the backup mouse and keyboard controls (although voice recognition has improved since the initial release). Mouse control works inconsistently, at times deselecting characters and thus making you issue commands to the whole squad and ruining your plan. At times, some characters will freeze and not complete their action, the solution being having them move to a point and then reattempt the action, which on mission 8 is a real delight.

The graphics are nothing special, but the soundtrack is good.

The core feature of this game is the ability to control your small team by voice commands. When it works, it is awesome and very fun. When it does not understand you, it can be quite frustrating. This is offset a bit by fairly forgiving difficulty, ability to pre-plan commands and activate them by simply calling "mark " and when everything else fails, using mouse and command menu. I was forced to use it in turret defence mission. I am not a native English speaker (my accent must be atrocious) and it seemed my microphone had low volume and I was unable to boost it further. Still, I was able to get it work, say 70% of time, and finish the game.
Graphics looks very good and aged well. Sound is superb - voice acting is great and music is awesome. I certainly recommend buying the soundtrack as well. Writing is also excellent, and story develops in an interesting and unexpected way.
The game is fairly short, but fun. With few moments of frustration, when you are not understood in the middle of battle and must forcefully calm yourself. It certainly can act as training aid for lowering and calming your voice under stress.

Real-time tactics game where you command units with your voice. Very interesting, quite fun to play, but your mileage may vary depending on your pronunciation of different words. As a non-English speaker, I struggled here and there, though when the system works, it's super satisfying.

Mark!

There Came an Echo is an XCOM styled visual novel operated through voice commands.
Having units not listening to your commands is exactly as aggravating as expected.
10/10, would get chastised for shouting again.

Real talk, it's a great game. The voice recognition *actually works.* The story is great. The voice acting is top notch, everyone is clearly having a good time.

It's such a shame that this game hasn't gotten the recognition it deserves. GIVE THEM MONEY!

I want to love it - I want the 49 hours played to actually be true - it isn't. I have maybe 5 hours in game. All 5 of those were spent shouting at Syll and Miranda, who for some reason simply wont do what i ask them.
For the record, I'm British without a regional accent and I've tried different microphones and head sets and nothing seems to get me past about 80% accuracy, which just isn't good enough to play.

OTOH though the music is fantasic, Wil and the other voice actors do a great job, what I've seen of the story is good, and I'm glad the developers took the risk and made the game, I don't regret the purchase. But damn that voice activation is wonky.

great game if you have the mic. if you don't it's still playable, but much less enjoyable.

English voice recognition is good. it can even recognize foreign accent.
Russian voice recognition is ...meh. at least it wasn't working for me, even though i'm a native speaker.

the game is fun, linear(and most of the time i've played it it was almost pure in-engine cutscene) ...but a bit short.

For a game with easily the best soundtrack of the year, this was a huge letdown.

I respect what this tech demo is trying to do but the voice recognition as it stands just doesn't work very well.

Gameplay wise, there are some glaring flaws, like when you double click on someone, the camera will go to them but it will DESELECT them. In what world does a strategy game exist where this is the case? This means that without clicking on them AGAIN, any orders get applied to the entire squad. Carefully laid out formations fell apart in a single moment. This was so infuriating on multiple occastions that I couldn't enjoy any part of the game afterward. I only finished it out of obligation for having paid for this.

I've played through the entire game about 4 times and I love it immensely. The voice controls generally work about 97% of the time for me (only one character, Syll, gives it trouble semi-regularly). If you enuciate, differentiate your commands with a pause, and use a headset, it works extremely well. That said, in the heat of battle sometimes it's hard to remember to enunciate and pause for breath :P

The story is definitely a thinker; great introspection material here. The characters are well done, even the characters you want to hate, and moral gray areas abound. Some phenom voice talent as well. The soundtrack? I listen to it outside the game all the time. Ronald Jenkees and Great Big Circles are amazing.

The graphics aren't fantastic, but they're pretty damn good for an indie game of this caliber. The tactical combat isn't super deep, but frankly, with voice controls and the learning curve around them, I wouldn't expect it to be too crazy. It is short, ~3 hours of gameplay + story for the campaign, which for me was just about right I think, but for some folks that may be too short of an experience.

As a WoW raid leader, I felt like I was directing my raiders around the battlefield. It's a familiar feeling in that respect, but it's definitely a novel experience in a standalone video game form.

I really wanted to like this game, because I loved Sequence (which is now renamed Before the Echo) and I learned that this game is a continuation of it. I had heard that you could play the game with a mouse if you didn't want to use the game's voice commands, and so I decided to try it out, but I wanted to give the voice commands a fair chance anyways. On a technical level, they work fine, and the game never had any trouble recognizing my voice, but they just don't add anything to the gameplay. There are a limited number of phrases that you use and most of the gameplay is just directing your squad members to the right designated points on the map and letting them do their thing, and even with the option of being able to swap out the game's default phrases and words with custom ones I never felt like I was actually talking to a squad because the technology just isn't there for it to be able to recognize anything more than the handful of preset phrases that you'll recite over and over throughout the game. The natural assumption would be to just switch to mouse controls, as I did, but you don't have to play for more than a few seconds to see just how awful it is. Instead of having a traditional point-and-click interface, you play the game by holding the right mouse button to bring up a contextual wheel with various orders on it to emulate the lines you give to your squad when using the voice commands, and it's a massive pain to use in the middle of gameplay. If you have to shoot a particular person for a mission, for example, in order to shoot them with the mouse controls you have to hover over them, hold the right mouse button, and search for the "target unit x" option, instead of just clicking on them like most games. In a turn-based game this would be fine, but in a real-time game it's counter-intuitive and makes the game a chore to play.

The story is still there, so if you really liked Sequence/Beyond the Echo like I did and this game goes down on sale enough it might be worth checking out just to see the story (though the game is pretty short, so you may want to wait for a particularly deep sale), but overall this game is just another example of "if it isn't broke, don't fix it".

Charming. From art, to voice work, to story; There Came an Echo exudes charm. Without spoiling anything, the story does seem a little odd, starting in the near future before graduating to some deep questions about identity, and self which I wouldn't have expected to find in a game.

Technically speaking, I think there were some things that could've been done better (for instance, a load check point option would've been nice as I found myself throwing my soldiers into walls of soldiers just to rewind quicker). The voice recognition kit's pretty solid, and the decision to limit movement to a preset check point system makes sense in this context, even if it is a little frustrating at times.

Trying to run a tactics game in real time by voice is a challenge, and I found myself having to force a calm state if only to keep my commands clear. It's a great sensation and one that isn't usually found in most games where victory tends to go to those with the quickest reflexes and the most energy to detonate at the right moment.

I think I would've liked this game more if it kept a step away from the metaphysical storyline, but that's not to say this was unwelcome. The pacing of the story is good, and ends early enough to not feel repetitive or dry. In short, recommend it highly, if only for the different experience of tactical squad command with your voice.

I'll start by saying this game is awesome. Awesome means to inspire awe, and the fact that I did 95% of the control with my voice was just that. It's good. You get pretty fast at it, which is good, because combat ramps up fairly quickly.

There Came an Echo has a fantastic voice cast. Wil Wheaton was good and hammed up up a little, but that's okay. Dramatic scenes call for a little melodrama. Laura Bailey is one of my favorite voice actresses. Period. And she kills it in this. The combat never loses track of the story, and if your crew seems a bit willing to go along with questionable activities... just remember people are trying to kill them.

Finally, a big kudos to Iridium for being responsive during launch. There were some bugs with microphone volume and the system forgetting to listen to you. Those got fixed (for me) the first night. You guys are great and you deserve all the support in the world.

Pros
Voice input system!
Enjoyable voice acting.
Great soundtrack.
Clever level design with mechanics that aren't just "kill everyone".
Developers were actively involved and interested in making sure everyone has a good play experience.

Cons
I had to wait one night for a patch. Oh lordy. ;)
I could have played another 40 hours of this game but beat it in a little under 5 hours.

Pros:
Fun when it works. amd it makes you feel awesome
Stressful giving orders
Cool Cyberpunk kinda of feel
Wil Wheaton - speaking of which all the voice actors were good
Interesting game

Cons:
Voice Reconition doesn't always works
Bugs: Open up a save game and the loadout screen will only give me Corrin and Miranda

Now I really do like this game, but I wanted to say "No" this game only to warn other people from buying this game. That is because the Voice Reconition didn't work for me first try and I mean first try. The game couldn't understand I said "Yes" or "Affirmative" or "Mark" for awhile. I really wish the game had a Calibration for you voice. The game pretty much wings that lol. The only thing it calibrates is the voice sensitivity which I feel like the game developers should have figured out a better calibration. That is my main issue. The cost of the game will be worth it if you had no problems with your voice commands. I would personally want more gameplay more story.

If I had to recomend to the developers is make a demo version of There Came of Echo. That reason would be so other fellow gamers will play the demo and test out there mic. Also make a better voice calibration.

In the end should you buy it? If you think you have a good mic then yes, if you don't then no. You can play with out a mic but its not worth it.

This game is actually a lot of fun. At first, I was skeptical of the 'Voice Command' gimmick but it's voice recognition is pretty legit, although, sometimes if you get excited it might not pick you up. The combat is actually like a simplified Real-time version of X-COM with a more linear storyline. All in all, I don't regret spending less than 20 for it. Plus I find it satisfying saying to Corrin, "GET YOUR FUCKING HEAD DOWN, WIL WHEATON!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HCpgj-Lgrw