Echoes of Elysium: Navigating the Skies is Now Possible - PC Preview

What if we told you there's a video game where you build ships in the sky, explore, fight, and embark on an intense adventure with friends? Well, Echoes of Elysium is that kind of video game, which certainly doesn't aim to present itself as an unprecedented experience, but rather to offer a cooperative gaming environment in the vein of titles like Sea of Thieves: only in this case, we might be seen as sky pirates rather than sea wolves.

Echoes of Elysium is therefore a cooperative survival RPG where we'll be aboard an airship that we'll build "simply by crafting" and which will become our floating fortress. As you might have guessed, you'll need to gather resources, explore a vast procedural open world, and also team up with up to six friends (don't make the mistake of playing alone, because boredom could be just around the corner).

Loric Games' title is thus geared towards multiplayer, even better if you have a circle of friends with whom you usually play long online sessions. What we found ourselves facing is an early access, a game "in the making" that could undergo some changes in the future thanks to developer support. 

Echoes of Elysium presented us with a fun challenge, although in the long run there could be moments of absolute boredom: especially if the hard work of "crafting" isn't for the player. So let's see what our feelings were after spending several hours with it.

In Echoes of Elysium, you can navigate the skies!

Like any good game focused on online cooperation and building, Echoes of Elysium doesn't offer a rich and multifaceted plot. In our journey through the skies, we will be simple adventurers who must travel to an authentic paradise full of mechanical wonders. Among the winds of Elysium echoes a long-forgotten name, Heron: who could this be? In any case, we will have to uncover some dark secrets of past realms in a procedurally generated world inspired by ancient Greek mythology (in some ways, it reminded us of Immortals Fenyx Rising, although the genre is completely different).

The first thing to do, after joining a friend's game or creating a personal lobby, is to generate your alter-ego. However, at least initially, there is no customization menu: we can opt for a male or female avatar, without any options that allow us to choose facial features.

After this, you find yourself on a small boat moored near a large floating rock, where you collect the first resources useful for building your ship. We immediately found ourselves, fortunately after joining other online players, having to gather a considerable amount of items to give shape to the vessel. You might ask? If you can't navigate yet, how do you move through the skies?

For this purpose, we will have a glider that will allow us to move from one small island to another to "craft" what is needed, which reminded us of the system used by giants like Fortnite and Minecraft. However, the various islands (at least at the beginning) won't have much to offer: fortunately, wood, minerals, and other materials will be transported by the atmosphere in an almost magical way. However, you must pay attention to stamina: if it drops to zero, we will fall into the void, and we believe that's not a good thing. 

Continuing with the construction, we will always unlock new "contraptions" like the workbench, essential for generating everything needed to allow our flying vessel to reach the most remote places. It must be acknowledged that this initial phase, as in other similar video games, proved to be quite boring, or at least until Echoes of Elysium put its foot on the accelerator and started to get us into the thick of the action. 

So we never stopped, and after generating a nice sword (not exactly beautiful, but at least functional), we finally left this place heading towards the first real objective. Obviously, you can pilot the ship and also decide the cruising speed thanks to simple keyboard commands. Oh right, we hadn't told you yet: Echoes of Elysium does not support controllers in this early access version, so you might find some difficulty if you are not familiar with mouse and keyboard.

To navigate the skies, you can rely on an interactive map, which you can not only open at any time, but which will guide you to the next point of interest: very useful especially in those phases where you completely lose your bearings (and it happened to us more than once). 

Team Collaboration is Essential in Echoes of Elysium

As mentioned, Echoes of Elysium closely resembles Sea of Thieves: you sail, collect items with the winch while catching favorable winds, and dock on islands rich in resources and some mystery. Not only that, but locations can be inhabited by various villains, endowed with energy and sometimes even powerful armor: this is where the Action/RPG soul comes into play, where we'll need to be particularly skilled (and well-equipped) to prevail. However, a sword slash and some good dodges will be enough to knock them down and "gobble up" their loot. 

It seemed to us that the underlying idea, at least for the construction of the game world, is somewhat inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, especially concerning the more action-oriented part and the appearance of some adversaries like the crawler, straight out of some Hyrule shrine. 

Echoes of Elysium is therefore a multiplayer online role-playing game, where it will be essential to dedicate oneself completely to crafting to achieve true satisfaction. After all, it is the core, the engine that drives this entire experience and which, apart from the necessary overall repetitiveness, manages to entertain quite convincingly. However, we want to clarify one point: even if it's true that the entire experience can be played in single-player, we advise you not to, because you might get bored after a very short time.

It's so obvious how everything has been built for cooperation, for joining forces, for thinking as a group, and for assaulting islands as one big team. Playing solo is not that exciting, trust us, we experienced it firsthand. And even playing with strangers might not be a good idea, as you would never be able to synchronize on the same frequency.

To fully enjoy this video game, let's be frank, you need a lot of patience, but above all, you need to love teamwork, resource management, and sharing a common goal. During our test, we encountered some small bugs that "forced" us to restart the game and other moments where we couldn't collect resources. Furthermore, on several occasions, we couldn't enter other players' lobbies: the loading was so endless that we had to abandon the idea of crossing paths with other sky adventurers. 

Echoes of Elysium invents nothing and incorporates all the features present in any survival MMO with crafting characteristics. Creating your own flying ship and shaping it according to the group's tastes proves to be very interesting, provided you pay the price of a certain repetitiveness (but this seems very much linked to the genre itself). We hope that the development team will support this project in the best possible way: the premises don't seem bad at all.