Echelon Reviews

OOOOkay.... so it took a while to get this to actually run... That was very frustrating.. But.. Once you get it to work, this game is very fun. I like the strafe left/right thrusters on the fighters and I like the levels that actually can challenge you and require skille to complete. I'm going to recommend this title, but with a stern finger wag at steam for releasing a title that requires customers to research how to get the game to actually launch...

This is an old game; I enjoyed it back in the day. I don't have any delusions about it supporting 5.1, or modern resolutions, or my xbox controller. However, it should be sold in such a state that it launches and is playable. This game can't be launched, and is not playable. (note: there are some folks having luck with a 3rd-party patch)

I bought it for few cents, paid too much. This is ablsolute, pure, 100% non-working s***. I tested it on windows 10 x64, windows 7 x64 sp1 and windows xp sp3 (win7 and win xp via virtualbox). The only working part of it is the *.bat file, that has to be modified in order to idle cards.

In its time this game was one of the funnest flight games around. Now it needs a patch to launch single player. Just leave your memories of this great game as it is, memories of the past.

great game, but its kinda buggy, but i like it

Echelon is a classic flight sim similar to X-Wing, Tie-Fighter or Crimson Skies. It's fun, but often unreasonably difficult. This release, however, is broken. It runs, but requires a lot of work to get running. Buy at your own risk. Also, for some reason they replaced the old menu music with something awful.

I'm adding my two cents because a handful of [REDACTED] were too challenged to check the 'Guides' section to get this running, so they decided to review bomb this absolute gem. Echelon is fun. Echelon is ARMA meets the original Ghost Recon BUT WITH SPACESHIPS. Really, I can't downplay how damn tactical this game is. It released in 2001? No way. Echelon is STILL ahead of it's time - and it's been two decades. If you enjoy flight simulators, or tactical/combat simulators in general, Echelon offers a level of realistic difficulty that hasn't been revisited by video games since - I'm not bluffing, I have a few hundred hours on Elite Dangerous (with comparable playtime in Elite and Frontier Elite to boot) - Echelon still catches my feeble mind off guard. My tactics are futile. My life is forfeit. I'm NOTHING to Echelon, and that's exactly how it should be. Fun fact; Bethesda practically sabotaged this game, single-handedly destroying any chance of a fair release, and bankrupting the original developers. It's quite the heart-wrenching tale, Echelon would have been considered a stepping stone back then, and would be seen one of the many developments crucial to modern video games - had it launched, formally. But it didn't. As Echelon stands, it is a complete game with a few minor inconveniences due to a lack of TLC (thanks Bethesda for being soulless husks). Honestly, it might seem a little petty, but recognising the rich history in Echelon's trials and tribulations has made me regret every cent I've spent on anything owned by ZeniMax - I won't spend another. The campaign is fun. There are fewer bugs than in modern releases, and it has some interesting little quirks, like a sandbox approach to completing objectives and a very realistic difficulty (fly an Apache over Russian soil right now and find out). The load/save systems can be a little clunky/unreliable at times, and you're really thrown in the deep end with very little guidance - but it really suits the game. It has on offer what you'd find in some of the older combat/flight simulators (they're more like hardware showcases for the M1A1 and YF-22 to be fair), but in a space setting that really sets the mood. The retro cutscenes are wonderfully atmospheric, there's a dash of crude humour, and the armaments at your disposal couldn't be cooler. When you eventually finish the game or get bored - the multiplayer has bots and there is no (true) limit to how many you spawn - my hardware clocked out at about two thousand (2000) bots as far as I remember, please let me know how many you got in before crashing, or sitting with an unresponsive slideshow. There's no reason for somebody not to host a server and play the OPEN WORLD multiplayer with a few friends and some bots in 2021 - Echelon supports dedicated servers, has a comprehensive set of console commands, and runs really well on modern systems.

An old and, for me, classic game, something of a classic example of old Russian game-design, in both good and bad senses of the term. The graphics have not aged particularly well, and the menus are sometimes a pain to navigate, but overall it remains a solid arcade-ish "action sim", with neat gameplay and a bit of originality, some of which has remained to this day even. There aren't a whole lot of these "futuristic VTOL gunship" sims on PC nowadays for some reason. In regards to the Steam release: Well, the English localization is an interesting contrast to the Russian I remember. And the game did not launch for me the first time around. It took me the [i]unimaginably difficult[/i] effort of going to the game's install directory and running the game's launch script as an administrator to set up the necessary registry and be able to play. (:P) No, I didn't notice the line in the system requirements telling me to run the game as an administrator at first either. Not needing a CD in the drive (which this tablet doesn't have anyway) is a definite plus over the times I played it in the past though. :P

[h1] Beware [/h1] This game is terribly mantained. You'll probably need to edit a *.bat file in order to get it running in anything newer than Windows 7. It really show lack of care from the publishers that they don't properly maintain what otherwise is a cult game well worth playing. (The reason for that being this: https://www.bluesnews.com/a/268/open-letter-to-bethesda-softworks ) The game runs in Linux, but you'll have to put on some effort editing the .bat file and making shure all the paths go to the right directories.

There might be some nastalgia playing into my review of this game. It's recalls my favorite time in gaming, when titles like Terminal Velocity and Descent Dominated PC gaming. The tourtorial is a bit lacking so taking some time learning the controls from the options menu first will go a long way, the instant action option is a nice touch and multiplayer (with some system tweaking) is workable and entertaining at lans. To address the Negative reviews: There seems to be a trend of people assuming that this new wave of old games getting re-released on steam are similar to 'remakes' available on consoles. These are more like diving in the bargin bin at a local retailer. They aren't repolished with new fixes for modern machines, most will require a few extra steps to get running and this should be expected if you are buying anything before 2009. This one is no exception, luckily there aren't as many issues as with some other titles. I was able to get it up and running by right clicking on the gamelauncher.bat in the install folder and running as administrator. After running it once this way it launches fine from steam. Just so you don't think I have some odd setup that might be old enough to be compatible: i7 3770k 16 gigs of ddr3 Geforce 780 Win7 x64 240gig SSD