Interface

Clicketty-click

The interface in Echelon is surprisingly clumsy. It has been quite a while since we've seen a front-end this counter-intuitive. It isn't outright bad or even mediocre, it just feels misleading, for lack of a better word. When you enter a menu, the options there aren't always what you'd expect, or where you would expect them. A player in a rush can easily blow by the Load and Save options, which only appear at certain points, Load right after you click the Singleplayer campaign, and Save right after a mission. If you fail to save after that mission, you won't be able to go back except through the autosave (which gets overwritten each time you pass a mission.) These aren't major problems, but little irritants that can get somewhat annoying. A good example is trying to reach the options menu while in the game - good luck, because you can't. If you wanted to change sound, control or graphics options, you wouldn't be able to until you quit the mission and went all the way back to the root menu.

Other problems with the interface creep up when dealing with said options. Some graphic and sound effect options can be reached from the in-game interface, others you must actually quit the game to reach in the setup menu. Each time you wish to play Echelon or use the setup menu, you need to go through a loader program which automatically plays a Bethesda intro movie, while still in Windows, with the requisite resolution changes that involves. Again, these aren't big problems, but together they and others like them add up to make a clunky front-end interface.

Oooh, lens flare

The roads are nice, now if only the tanks would follow them

How about the game controls?

Echelon eases you into play with a set of three tutorial missions which you must go through. Any gamers out there who like to play their space sims with mice, might as well bow out or get a joystick. Playing Echelon with the mouse is like playing Quake with only a keyboard - possible, but it's just not right. There are five major settings for the mouse, but none of them feels particularly good. You can choose to control yaw (moving sideways) or roll with the X axis (side-to-side movement) of your mouse, with "instant" movement, or movement with momentum. Instant movement is like Quake - you stop moving the mouse, your plane stops moving. It's not particularly realistic nor intuitive, and no matter what the mouse settings are, you never seem to achieve a good enough speed with your mouse. The momentum effect, on the other hand, makes flying very difficult.

The best option seems to be Emouse, which plays somewhat like mouse control in Wing Commander games. You have a cursor which you move across your screen, and the computer will automatically fly your aircraft in that direction in the most appropriate fashion - it will handle roll, pitch and yaw for you. This setting does tend to cause players to overshoot their targets, and needs a lot of tweaking for good play.

Thrusters at work

Check out the dust cloud right below the ship

Once you tire of trying the mouse and keyboard and switch to joystick and keyboard, things become much simpler. Echelon's controls are remarkably simple once you learn to control either yaw or roll with the keyboard, per your preference. Despite the vast number of controls, Echelon is quite playable with just your joystick and just a few keyboard commands. The in-game control and interface is as good as the front-end is bad. The ease with which Echelon introduces players to yaw, roll and rudder control when they might be expecting the more simplistic space-sim or flight-sim controls is remarkable. Space sims generally don't worry about either roll or yaw - you simply find the fastest way to get to a point and do it. Flight sims ignore yaw except when they let players play with the rudder, and that's generally an 'advanced' option. The developers clearly put a lot of thought into the joystick/keyboard control scheme and it shows.

Thankfully you don't have to land manually

Gee, I wonder why the brass wants to join our celebration