Game: Echoes
Developer: Halfbrick Studios
Genre: Puzzler
Verdict: Just not addictive enough and so instantly forgettable.
Pros: Bright colours, lively music and a simple concept
Cons: Fails to ignite any desire to replay
Acquired: Developer Provided
In order to review Echoes properly I would like you to imagine that I am reading this review to you in my best Australian accent, sipping a schooner of lager and grinning like Paul Hogan.
Echoes is a PSP Mini title from down under – a high concept game that encourages you to play by instinct in order to solve its many puzzles. At its very basic level you guide what seems to be a small hat around a variety of geometric spaces collecting jewels and avoiding the Echoes that you leave behind you as you travel. This means the game’s levels play like a game that constantly occupies a random space on a scale that runs from Snake to Geometry Wars.
Echoes empolys a very quirky watercolour visual scheme filled with bright colours that gives the game acertain vibrancy to it at first glance. All the puzzles are accompanied by cheery electro-pop theme music which does convey the urgency of the puzzle tasks.
The puzzle tasks themselves vary across the arcade mode but all involve collecting a certain number of crystals as quickly as possible. Playing through the arcade mode opens up the other three game modes - jackpot in which you collect as many crystals as possible before the time runs out, the more crystals you can collect before touching an echo the more you score; survival in which you collect crystals and try and survive without touching an echo within the time limit and finally clockwork, in which you can wind the echoes forwards an backwards to help you collect as many crsytals within the time limit.
The puzzle game genre is a difficult one to break into and really make a title that stands out. Back in 1989 Tetris pretty much defined what a good puzzle game should be and every puzzle game since then has been trying to live up to the Russia’s most enduring contribution to video games. Every puzzle game made since Tetris, especially on a portable platform, has the bar set distressingly high.
Echoes is one of the latest in a long line of games to try and meet this standard on a portable platform and to be honest, despite Halfbrick’s curious and entirely valiant efforts it falls short in one key area- addictiveness It does not capture the attention at all. All the elements are there – catchy tunes quirky graphics and twitch-inducing gameplay – but for some reason they just don’t gel together. The result is that the game feels flat, bland and instantly forgettable.
If I am going to buy a puzzle game for any platform I want to it to be more addictive than crack; I want to NEED to play it and Echoes just doesn’t create any sort of compulsion to play. Puzzle games, for me, have to ceate an addiction that not even a spell in the Betty Ford Cllinic can flush out the desire to play.
Sadly, Echoes has neither the sustain or the reverberation to live up to its name.
Popularity: unranked [?]
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