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Echelon
By James Sterrett

Product Name: Echelon
Version: Pre-release Demo
Category: Futuristic Military / Space Simulation
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Buka
Release Date: March 2001
Minimum Spec: PII266, 64 Mb Ram, 650 Mb HDD Space, 3d-accelerator, 8X CD-ROM, Direct Sound compatible sound card
Recom'd Spec: PII450, 128Mb Ram, 750 Mb HDD Space, 3d-accelerator, 32X CD-ROM, Direct Sound compatible sound card
Review system: P3-500, 128Mb RAM, 32Mb TNT2, Win 98SE, DX8.
Links: | Demo ("Storm/Echelon," Russian Version) | Russian "Storm / Echelon" web site |
Article Type: Preview
Article Date: March 21, 2001

Your Combat Mission - courtesy of Base Bravo

Buka recently released a Russian-language demo of Echelon (known in Russian as Storm). Since Russian poses no problem for your intrepid reviewer, I set my modem to work and now can bring you news of this upcoming toy. (It turns out the demo is partly in Russian and partly in English – sometimes combining the two on one screen! The briefings and the in-flight voices are in Russian, but parts of the loadout screens and much of the in-flight text is in English.)

Choose Your Weapon

Echelon is described as a space simulator. It’s as well to keep this firmly in mind. The vehicles in the game do not handle or behave like aircraft as we know them today; if you are looking for a game in which the vehicles obey such laws, go elsewhere. Instead, these craft appear to maneuver on the basis of thrusters. Some of the thrusters keep you in the air, some provide roll, pitch, yaw, plus horizontal and vertical translation. The greatest thrust is available for making the craft go forwards, but maneuver in the manner of a Harrier is possible at slower speeds. All this is reasonably controllable, though I was not happy to find I could not map the left-right and up-down translation vectors to my joystick’s hat (which is used for viewing, by default).

Headed into the Merge

The demo provides two missions, one air-to-air, one air-to-ground. Two deathmatch scenarios are also provided, but I could not play these because Echelon refused to link up over our home LAN. In both single player scenarios, waves of enemies—your choice of aircraft or tanks—come after you, and your sole purpose is to defeat them. The documentation claims that the waves are endless, but in fact the enemy does eventually stop coming.

An enemy aircraft dueling a flak tower

The player has the option of using several different aircraft. Each of these “feels” different in that their rates of turn or acceleration are different. Some are quite nimble, some turn like dead cows. (There’s also a bug that sometimes crops up, in which an aircraft will roll uncontrollably. Restarting the mission usually cures this.) Inertia is certainly modeled with some care, and failure to appreciate this can easily send an aircraft slamming into the side of a hill or the bottom of a valley. The flight model seems comparable in depth to that used by the holy Independence War.

En route to an enemy tank

All the action in the demo takes place near the ground. My view of the terrain graphics varied. Sometimes, it seems very pretty; sometimes it feels rather dated. It does often seem quite sparsely populated, a feeling accentuated by the very rare small tree. On the other hand, the reflective and translucent water is nicely done, and it gives a good “feel” as you fly over it. In fact, my wife likes flying around the terrain at NOE just for the challenge and fun of it. Some parts of the terrain are reminiscent of the Rockies or Scotland. Other parts of the terrain look like nothing we’ve ever seen. It does look better in motion than it does in the still screenshots, and it runs smoothly on our system at 1024x768x32.

Now all we need is a good single malt whisky...

The explosions are flashy. Destroyed aircraft break into burning, smoking parts, and destroyed tanks burn for a while, cooking off the odd round of ammunition. The aircraft can lose parts, which has some effect on the flyability of the aircraft. You don’t lose lift, per se, from losing a wing (since lift comes from belly thrusters), but the resulting nearly-uncontrollable roll is pretty hard to deal with!

Enemy tanks under fire

The combat model also comes from space sims, or perhaps Mech combat. A small meter above a selected craft shows the percentage of damage it has suffered, and if you do not continue to pound on a target, it will regenerate back to full health. Weapons range from slug and plasma cannons to guided missiles and unguided rockets. The heavier weapons have a slower recharge rate, or an ammunition limit, but do much more damage than faster-firing light weapons. The combat is reminiscent of Wing Commander at ground level, but with a more complex flight model—or perhaps MechWarrior in aircraft. The trappings of the game have the same combination of sim and game. It's hard to tell how the missions in the main game will work from the demo, but there's some hope of the "realistic" side winning out over the "arcade", given the presence of the "228th CAS Division and the 28th Fighter Division mailing list members" in the credits.

Losing half a wing isn't fatal, but it makes control difficult

Is the game fun? Well, I’m a nut for hard-core sims: my current top sim addictions are Steel Beasts and Falcon 4, and I’m drooling in anticipation of 1C’s IL-2 Sturmovik. I loved Independence War, but found Wing Commander dull and repetitive. Echelon amuses me, but it doesn’t really manage to trigger my immersion pleasure circuits. Part of this may be the nature of the demo missions, since I find “endless waves of bad guys” essentially boring. It may appear I’m intending to damn Echelon with faint praise. That’s not the case. Based on this demo, Echelon is in fact a good game, but it isn’t a great game. If you prefer your sim fare on the lighter side, if you prefer Wing Commander to Independence War, you’ll likely find the Echelon demo to be very much your cup of tea (or should that be, "your samovar of chai"?) My final opinion of the game will depend on the nature of the missions in the full game, which could move the game either closer to Wing Commander or towards Independence War.

It can be awfully pretty

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