Synduality Echo of Ada review

Synduality Echo of Ada is one of those games that feels custom-made for me. A third-person mech action game that takes the extraction shooter formula and twists it into something more social and accessible, with an unusual structure hiding a wealth of optional story tied into a recent anime series. It aims high, but an interesting concept can only take you so far, and the end results here feels like three half-finished games stapled together.

I had pockets of fun with Synduality. Of the 20-plus hours I’ve clocked so far, the first 15 were a compelling journey of discovery. From choosing and customizing my first Magus (the android co-pilot that provides constant chatter and guidance in and out of the mech cockpit), to my first tentative forays into the post-apocalyptic wastes, to scavenging enough work gloves to clean the weeds out of my doer-upper mech hangar, all the way to my first (accidental) PvP encounters in the field, I thought it was all building to something. But Synduality never gets better than its opening hours.

Friendly fire

Synduality is (at least initially) an extraction shooter, inspired by the likes of Escape From Tarkov, but in lightweight mechs that remind me a bit of Hawken’s twitchy yet streamlined rumbling robots. You explore a hostile wasteland full of monsters and NPC bandits, collect loot, then try to bring it home to sell or craft into useful upgrades for your base. Normally it’s a cutthroat genre that players treat as a high-stakes deathmatch where everyone’s risking their best gear for a slight advantage over the competition. But Synduality aims to ease newcomers into the action by making co-op (albeit with strangers—there’s no way to roll out with your buddies) the default way to play.

Unless you choose to go rogue and immediately start blasting other players (in which case you’ll be exiled to a harder, more PvP-centric map), you’re probably going to be working alongside other players more than fighting with them. While I had the occasional tussle that usually ended with an apology for reflexively shooting at another player, my Magus let me know whether sighted players had a reputation for causing trouble, and a friendly ‘Hello’ emote was usually enough to defuse any tensions, letting me focus on the satisfying loop of hunting post-apocalyptic monsters and bandits, gathering treasure and slowly converting my hangar into a home.

I found the base renovations to be surprisingly fun. Between some lively animations and chatter from my Magus, there’s a real sense that I was turning a ruined, rusted building into my home, with a couch and coffee table parked cutely in front of the mech repair platform. The game goes to great lengths to get you attached to your Magus, endlessly doting servant-partners reminiscent of the Pawns from Dragon’s Dogma. It even has you install a bathroom so you can watch them bathe in (purely work-safe and PG-13) cutscenes… for a small in-game price per bath session. Yes, this anime game is very anime.

Low roller

Fully relaxed after bath time, stakes remain low in the field. Rolling out with the free, default mech chassis (which I found perfectly serviceable for most non-PvP runs), I only had to insure my guns. Even in the few cases where I did die I sometimes managed to get to my fallen mech and recover everything, claiming both the insurance payment (around 80% of the lost gear’s value) AND all my lost gear, turning defeat into a lucrative and potentially exploitable misadventure. A curious design oversight, and sadly indicative of a slightly thoughtless whole.

Synduality’s greatest failing is that the moment-to-moment combat is very flat. Enjoyable in short bursts as a lightweight mech game where movement has more heft than your average third-person shooter, but you’re still running with a very standard FPS protagonist’s loadout. A melee attack, a pair of guns (SMGs, Shotguns, Snipers—all familiar stuff upscaled), maybe a few grenades and a special power via your Magus that can be used once every five minutes or so. New mech chassis types only offer moderate stat boosts, no real interesting build options and very little visual customization. Shooting stuff is fun enough, and some of the guns are satisfyingly loud, but you’ll be doing a lot of mag-dumping into the same few slow and spongy targets, with monsters only really being a threat if they sneak up on you and NPC bandits demanding stop-and-pop tactics from cover.

The choice to have the weak-point on mechs be their back (where your Magus is held) rather than the head is a nice tactical twist, making facing danger head-on into the safer option. But unless you’re an actively rogue player, PvP doesn’t happen often. With combat so predictable (especially against NPC enemies), the tension of getting away with a good haul that so many extraction shooters rely on was absent, replaced with an almost Animal Crossing-like cozy loop of resource-hunting and watching numbers go up. Not unpleasant, but hardly gripping.

At least there’s somewhere to go for a shot of more concentrated action, even if it feels barely attached to the greater game and only a little more focused than open-world scavenging. Around 10 hours in I unlocked the first few missions of a weirdly located solo campaign. Scripted missions where you pilot a fixed mech through checkpointed, scripted battles. Strange, and made all the weirder as the only rewards for these single-player diversions are ‘historical’ cutscenes, animatics and audio logs that feel like they’re from an earlier, more story-driven iteration of the game, but are otherwise unrelated to the looting and shooting extraction loop.

Small world

After 15 hours the cracks really began to show. I’d unlocked the ‘harder’ second map, but quickly realized that it only mildly escalated the stakes. I was still fighting the same five NPC enemy types with the occasional palette-swapped elite variant and only rarely exchanging fire with human players. The missions weren’t offering anything new. The only thing that was really speeding up was my XP gain, which only serves to unlock more seasonal battle pass rewards. And yes, this being a Bandai Namco game, you can buy battle pass levels or expensive premium outfits for your Magus, on top of the game’s retail price. Standard enough for a live service game in 2025, but still exhausting to think about.

After 20 hours I had just grown tired of it all. Nothing was changing. Runs remained uneventful. I was looping around the same two maps, picking up the same items. The combat’s simplicity was wearing thin, and technical flaws like excessive motion blur and occasional performance stutters (potentially network-related) became increasingly grating. Synduality’s goal to make extraction shooters more friendly and social is a laudable one, but once the novelty wears off, there’s just not much here.

Perhaps things will change again if I give into growing temptation and become a bandit myself. Preying on unsuspecting players, building up my bounty and encouraging ‘law-abiding’ players to try hunting me instead. But then I remember the gentle, Animal Crossing-like vibes from my own early runs, and I don’t think I’ve got it in me to ruin that for someone else.