Sound Test: There Came An Echo's War Room

Craig ooohd and ahhd in the direction of There Came An Echo back in April, but I'll take basically any excuse to mention it again. From Sequence devs Iridium Studios it's a real-time tactical game with a cyberpunk aesthetic which pushes voice commands as the primary means of interaction. They went through Kickstarter originally, managing a cool $25k above their $90k target in March last year. It's properly gorgeous and I'm very excited to get my hands and, uh, mouth on it once we get to the planned release later this year. The most recent trailer shows off the war room, a wave-defense style arena designed to allow experimentation with custom voice controls and tactics. Plan carefully how you proceed to it below.

I can imagine most of my custom commands will involve a lot of swearing. If possible, I will communicate only through them while organising frighteningly genius assaults and defenses, finally realising a dream since childhood. The exact intonation and sequencing of my fucks and shits will finally have the deep respect of an army of soldiers they deserve. If you don't have such ambition though, the entire game will be playable with the more traditional mouse, keyboard and/or gamepad.

Iridium went into some of the details as to why they felt the need to add this mode in a Kickstarter update. Essentially, the narrative structure of the game wasn't providing players with the opportunity to mess around with its systems to the degree they might like. Not only do missions vary from one-another such that developing expert control of one selection of units might not transfer to the next but there is "a fair bit of cutscene" that might get in the way of those after pure play. It was first developed for showing at public events, since a walk-up crowd wouldn't have a lot of time for story, but is now being expanded for inclusion in the full game.

Another update teases one of the ten missions that Iridium are developing, similar to a tower defense map, as well as a sneak peak at some of the music. The primary composer is Jimmy 'BigGiantCircles' Hinson, whom anyone with taste will recognise from his brilliant work on the Final Fantasy VII OCRemix album, Voices of the Lifestream (and a couple of other, less important projects like Mass Effect 2). See, I can link to music at the end of articles too, Sunday Papers!