AA Double-Whammy ("Echoes of the End" and "Robots at Midnight")

Publisher: Deep Silver, Prime Matter, Plaion

Developer: Myrkur Games

Platforms: Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Playstation 5 (Reviewed)

Echoes of the End is exactly as exciting as its title suggests: not at all. It's the kind of slop that I'm shocked still gets made, but I guess mediocrity is as human an endeavor as breathing. I can't recall the last time I experienced something so uninspired. So, yeah, Echoes of the End isn't getting a recommendation from me, as I couldn't force myself to get all the way through it. I try to clean my proverbial plate these days, but every time I thought about going back to this runnest of the mills, I felt my heart sink.

In Echoes of the End, you play as Ryn, a "vestige" (no clue what that is) who takes care of her younger brother in just about the most bog standard Norse fantasy world you can imagine. She's also a tremendously unlikeable person. All she ever does is whine and complain and get angry and condescend, and while the dev team does attempt to create some lore around it (a person can evidently die if they touch a "vestige", so she tries to instill discipline in everyone she meets for their own goods), it doesn't really work. This game is desperate to be a female-led God of War, so I did some double-standard checking and considered whether or not I would feel this negative if it were Kratos in this role speaking all the same lines with the same inflections...and I landed on "yes." See, Kratos' character in the God of War reboot was all about his tenderness breaking through his usual anger. We would see him lose his cool, try to mend things with varying degrees of success, etc. With Ryn, the devs clearly didn't get this, so it's all anger and condescension all the time. Had that anger and condescension been written by people with an actual understanding of the character they were clearly trying to rip off, she would have been a great protagonist...but we don't live in that particular timeline. 

Anyway, one day an evil empire shows up to harness the power of purple crystals for eeeeevilll, and with that, we have our story...such as it is. I'll say this: the stand-in for Baldur (another "vestige" named Zara) is my favorite part of this mediocre experience. Every word she says is spoken through clenched teeth, and her animations reinforce that. So every time she's on screen, she tries supremely hard to be the angriest, most badass villain of all time. Needless to say, it just comes off like a high school theatre performance, and I enjoyed every second of it! That's the only thing I enjoyed, though. 

As I've been implying, Echoes is trying so hard to be God of War that it's laughable. Climbing sections, shuffling through rock passages, squeezing under fallen pillars, puzzles where you use an ability to freeze a piece of something while you move everything around it, combat scenarios where you have a companion use weak attacks on whatever enemy you're locked on to by pressing the square button, boss fights against a giant crone, the list goes on. That would be all well and good were it not for the clear lack of budget in this project. Despite having three publishers (THREE), this is clearly a AA game...so why they needed THREE publishers to fund it is beyond me. I don't want to gatekeep here, but I must: if you want to emulate the look and feel of an astronomically-budgeted Sony first party IP like God of War, then you NEED a big budget. It isn't a suggestion, it's a prerequisite. If you try for that level of cinematography in gameplay, then you need to be able to fund that cinematography, otherwise it just feels janky and stilted. Most if not all AA games feel janky and stilted, but it's far worse in Echoes of the End because of this specific issue.

To hammer home that idea a bit more, let's talk about combat. It blows. It's all standard hack-and-slash fare: a dodge, a parry, a light attack, a heavy attack, etc, but it's executed in just about the most amateur hour way you can imagine. The next game in this article clearly had a much smaller budget, and even it does this kind of combat well, but Echoes of the End couldn't be bothered. The lock-on is more of a suggestion than anything, as it doesn't really do anything with the camera other than an initial repositioning when you click the right thumbstick. Combos are more set-in-stone here than ever before. This means that you do like 3 or 4 swings with set timings, then there's a brief pause before you can swing again. Par for the course, but it seems like the game saves your position in the combo at all times. So if you dodge or parry after swing 2, you'll pick up at swing 3 with swing 3's timing once you swing again. This means that you'll sometimes only swing once when you finish dodging or parrying because you did so on the last swing of the combo. Good luck capitalizing on your parries or dodges with that system in place! Also, there's kind of a perfect storm when it comes to visibility. Some intersection of camera positioning, Ryn's size, and your standard enemy's size come together to make it nigh impossible to actually see enemy attacks unless you intentionally move the camera to an awkward angle. 

As I said, I didn't finish Echoes of the End. I also didn't get far enough into it to think a score is warranted. But I'm going to reiterate that I don't recommend this game, and you know what else? I don't feel bad about it. I don't feel like I'm punching down by saying this little studio deserves not to be supported. After all, they managed to get three publishers on board for this travesty, so clearly they aren't hurting that much. Hopefully this is an echo of the end of this studio so nobody has to experience anything this uninspired again.

Publisher: Finish Line Games, Snail Games USA

Developer: Finish Line Games

Platforms: Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows (Reviewed), Playstation 5

On the opposite side of the quality spectrum, we have Robots at Midnight: a neat little action game with some scattered soulslike elements. In it, you are Zoe: a teenager (or maybe a young woman, the art style makes it hard to tell) trying to rescue her father from an evil cult of, you guessed it, robots. The game takes place on planet Yob, which was once some kind of luxury destination that became overrun with robots. After a planetwide blackout, some of these robots formed a cult centered around some deity beyond some void, and it's all about as important as you might guess from my general tone at the moment. It's all just a fun backdrop to plop the player in, not anything to write home about.

Anyway, it's the gameplay that rules the roost in Robots at Midnight, and it manages to do so while being as janky as AA titles typically are. On that note, let's get the negatives out of the way first.

Movement isn't very smooth, and this rears its head in a big way during the one or two mandatory platforming segments. Zoe can tend to float a little too far or not far enough at times. 

The music in each of the maybe 4 levels tends to be pretty repetitive (even if the tracks themselves are inoffensive). 

When you end up knocking an enemy down, they get knocked just a little too far back, which makes some manual distance-closing necessary. 

The last two bosses (and only these last two bosses) have odd checkpointing that results in long runbacks and, in the case of the final boss, an unskippable door opening segment with dialogue. 

Finally, the running animation for Zoe looks straight out of Fortnite. That's more an observation than a point of frustration, but I never once stopped thinking about that. 

That's all the negatives rolled up into one segment, so all that remains are the positives...and a lot of these positives are offshoots of things that should be negatives. 

For example, every weapon handles exactly the same way, just with different stat bonuses. Furthermore, the combos for each of these weapons are stiff and unchanging. These should be negatives, but they're outweighed by the general feeling of impact when you land a hit and the oddly satisfying sound effect that accompanies these hits. Your mileage may vary, but that's what I personally felt. 

For another example, there's close to zero enemy variety: you have tiny ball droids, standard robots, slightly upgraded robots, the occasional heavy hitting robot, and round brute robots. But the game makes up for this with some ever-so-slight differences in move sets between area variants of these enemies, and again, some of that lack of variety is put on the backburner because of the catharsis inherent in the gameplay. 

The move sets I briefly touched on are all simple and easy-to-read, which will be a negative for anyone expecting a soulslike rather than an action game with soulslike elements. But this ease-of-reading comes with the ability to execute satisfyingly-presented parries with ease, and in the case of unblockable red attacks, it allows for easy jump-offs. Essentially, you have a dash ability on a slight cooldown, and if you do it towards an enemy when they use an unblockable attack, you'll interrupt that attack by kicking off the enemy and backflipping away. Think of it as a more acrobatic mikiri counter from Sekiro. These kickoffs are awesome every time you get to use them, and while I would've liked to have seen more budget go into general movement, I'm glad that some emphasis was put on this movement in particular. This dash can also be used to mitigate that aforementioned distance-closing when you knock an enemy back, making the process feel a lot cooler.

Finally, the game was 100% free of glitches or performance trouble in my playthrough, and I'm pretty sure my PC is nothing special (hovering right at the minimum required technical specs). 

There's one issue I wanted to save for the end, and it's the one issue you'll see brought up in every review you'll read for this game: its length. When I picked this game up, it was under an introductory sale for $13.99, but once that sale is up, it'll be priced at $19.99. I spent somewhere between 5 and 6 hours in my playthrough, and that number can easily go down to 4 if you just blow through it all, or up to 8 if you're more meticulous than I was. While the game is split into 4 or 5 areas, for all intents and purposes it's really more like 3. Most areas are just same-y looking forests and underground facilities. Pair that with the aforementioned other ways in which this game lacks variety, and the value-for-money proposition easily gets called into question. So, that's a discussion you'll need to have with yourself before you spend your hard-earned money.

Robots at Midnight has this uncanny ability to fall into every bad game design decision you can think of and somehow make each decision work because of pure fun factor. It manages to have the prerequisite AA jank while still making its budget work in the ways that matter most: cool moves and technical fidelity. So, as you've no doubt realized by now, Robots at Midnight is far from a well-thought-out, well-designed game...but it is a fun one, and that's all that matters. Whether or not everything I've said is worth $20 is up to you, but for my money, I'd say it's worthwhile.

[With this being a small game, I'll be using my small game scale wherein the max points I can take off for a negative is 2]

Let us review:

Miscellaneous jank - 1.0

Debatable value-for-money - 0.5

The final score for Robots at Midnight is...

8.5/10 - Near Fantastic

Well done, Finish Line Games, well done!