While there was some risk that Quest 2’s inside-out tracking would prove problematic with Lone Echo II‘s hands-on locomotion-due to the controllers sometimes getting lost out of sight-found this to be extremely rare during my time with the game. Luckily its very reasonable 21GB size should be easy enough for most people to find room for on their fastest drives, even if only until they’ve completed the game.
Lone Echo II also seems to expect SSD speeds, as I saw fairly regular popping of some large textures during my HDD-installed playthrough. Using 4x or 2x MSAA will show more jaggies but everything will be much sharper. The game unfortunately suffers a lot from aliasing, but the Temporal AA solution adds a significant blur.
LONE ECHO STEAM KEY PLUS
Worth noting: I was playing the game on Quest 2 via Oculus Link, which means it was rendering at much higher resolution than if I had been using Rift S, plus Oculus Link uses some extra resources to work.ĭo yourself a favor when starting Lone Echo II: disable Temporal AA, then find the highest setting that will still run the game at 4x or 2x MSAA.
Unfortunately the game struggled a bit at times on an RTX 2080 Ti and an i7-6700K at Medium settings and 2x MSAA. Oculus recommends a GeForce GTX 1080 GPU and an Intel i7-6000 CPU, or higher. ImmersionĮven without improved graphics, it would have been great to see more significant optimizations to the game so that most everyone could enjoy it at its best presentation. Once you get out into open space it feels like there’s always something new to look at or explore. Of those optional quests that I did do, I found them generally enjoyable and felt like they added to the game’s sense of freedom and discovery.
LONE ECHO STEAM KEY FULL
The choice to hide a key scene behind the credits also seems odd, as I’m sure some players will take the headset off before seeing the full ending.Īll in all, Lone Echo II took me about nine hours to complete, though it would have probably taken me a few more had I opted to track down all of the optional quests. Though the characters are beautifully rendered and well voice-acted, the plot-like the gameplay-has a fairly flat arc that ends with an anti-climactic and slightly puzzling ending. Lone Echo II could have been forgiven for its leisurely pace if it had a great story and characters to lean into, but those aspects feel only so-so. There’s rarely any consequence for dying, the puzzles are never challenging enough to give you a “eureka!” moment, and the game’s single enemy feels more like a nuisance than a threat.įor the most part you’re leisurely going about your business in space, which can admittedly be fun thanks to a strong sense of immersion, but we already got a good dose of that in the first Lone Echo the sequel was the prime opportunity to evolve that gameplay into something more, not just more of the same. While many games teach players new skills and then puts those skills to the test through challenging situations, Lone Echo II just never asks that much of you, and subsequently doesn’t ever manage to raise the level of tension. The game returns quickly to the gameplay established by its predecessor-which involves running around causally completing various objectives-and manages to deliver a similar (and sometimes magical) feeling of actually floating in and around a space station orbiting Saturn.Īnd that brings me to a bit of a gripe with Lone Echo II: there isn’t much of a gameplay arc. Had there been more intrigue in the plot or growth of the characters, this might have been just fine, but in the absence of those things it can be a bit tiresome. While it’s nice that we get to meet some new characters this time around, this leads to extended dialogue sequences where you’re just kind of sitting around listening to people have slow conversations.
Lone Echo II is a very slowly paced game, sometimes to a fault. While on its surface one might think to classify the game as an action-adventure or adventure-puzzler, it’s actually closer to an adventure-exploration game, as it never manages to deliver much tension, action, nor puzzle intrigue. Now that that’s clear… Lone Echo II returns players to familiar gameplay and game structure. If you have any interest in playing Lone Echo II, you should really play Lone Echo first. Let’s get this out of the way right up front: Lone Echo II picks up almost immediately after the original game, and has a plot that’s heavily reliant on prior knowledge. Was it worth the wait? Read on to find out. After a nearly two-year delay, Lone Echo II is finally here to bring us full circle on Jack & Liv’s story.
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