Echoes of Aincrad review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Sword Art Online is one of those franchises you’ve probably watched the anime for at some point and knew it had a couple games but didn’t really think much more on it than that. The games can be hit or miss depending, so seeing more and more come out about Echoes of Aincrad drew my intrigue. A Sword Art Online game set during the initial events of the anime based on climbing the earlier floors sounded super cool, but it’s not all it’s lived up to be.

You spend a couple of hours getting used to the gameplay loop of Echoes of Aincrad during the “beta” of Sword Art Online by doing a couple quests and running a dungeon or two. It’s very standard action with your light and heavy attacks, dodge, and block options with a perfectly timed block resulting in a parry. The parry doesn’t really seem to be anything meaningful unless you have some passives that benefit perfect blocks. Blocking still helps, but it seems to be somewhat inconsistent on what it will and won’t actually block the damage from.

Part of your combat kit is gonna be your weapon skills you’ll unlock as you continue to use each weapon type and gain proficiency with them. Making the best use of these will be your easiest way to deal with bosses and oftentimes groups of enemies. The actual weapon skills are pretty neat, some of which include dodge attacks, wide sweeping attacks, overhead slams, etc. Making use of these with weapon passives to further assist you is your best strategy.

Sadly, outside of the cool animations and mostly solid combat, the enemy variety is pretty poor. By the 15 hour mark I had seen exactly 4 unique types of enemies with the variants being a recolor with more HP or a bigger model size with more HP and more damage. The floor bosses themselves are at least unique, especially if you remember some of the ones shown in the actual Sword Art Online anime. It’s a real shame the combat lacks variety and real depth outside of using your skills to repeatedly stagger and stun enemies while they deal most of your damage, because it could have been more fun. It’s not bad by any means, it’s just not as interesting as I think it could’ve been.

The story isn’t anything superb, you know what you’re getting with Sword Art Online. You’re a group of friends that got trapped in their NerveGear upon the official start of the game trying to fight their way out. You’ll meet a fun cast of party members as you progress and absolutely notice a few characters from the anime itself. I genuinely don’t really have much to say about it because it’s the story of Sword Art Online, if you’re playing this game you already know the story. It’s a decent enough adaptation for those that haven’t seen the anime at least, so you don’t really have to feel like you’re missing any context for anything. You might not recognize some of the characters from the anime that can get a little bit of a moment of “Hey I know that character”, but that’s not really a part of the game I’d wager matters.

I was really hoping the world would be better, too. Echoes of Aincrad does look pretty solid visually, including the texture quality and general art direction. Lighting looks mostly great, the towns are cool, and the environments themselves are pleasing. The only issue with said environments is that they’re not really diverse. I hope you like a lot of caves and forests because that’s most of what you’ll see. There are other zones that don’t share that specific biome type, but it’s so much of the game you’ll be playing that it genuinely just all blurs together.

Traversing these environments isn’t super interesting either because they’re pretty empty for an open world game built upon the premise of being stuck in an MMO. There’s some derelict ruins and stuff scattered pretty frugally around, but otherwise it’s mostly empty. There’s some chests here and there with some mostly useless loot with the exception of a new armor or weapon recipe if you’re lucky enough to find them. I didn’t really feel incentivized to do anything other than find one weapon with a passive I liked and just power level that specific weapon whenever I could. Finding crafting materials for items that get you to other “secret” chests wears off pretty quickly.

Echoes of Aincrad is by no means a bad game, it’s just not enough “game” I think. Combat could’ve used more fleshing out, the environments needed more to actually care about, and the story is just the story of Sword Art Online. If you’re a more casual gamer and want to experience SAO without watching any anime, it’s probably pretty solid for you, but it’s just not enough. With a AAA price tag, it’s a really hard recommendation to almost anybody. If you can find it on a discount, and you’re really into Sword Art Online, I’d say check it out, but for the general player I can’t imagine it’s hitting any niches or anything. Again, it’s not a bad game, it’s just not enough for what it should be. If the developers add more to it over time and continue to flesh it out then it could be better, but as it is, I don’t really see any reason to jump on Echoes of Aincrad.

Note: Bandai Namco provided us with an Echoes of Aincrad PC code for review purposes.

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