It's the year 2351, and you're a pilot trying to rise through the ranks all the way to glory. As a member of the Galactic Federation, you'll be granted more than 20 weapons to use in each pass-fail mission. Your goal is to defend the planet from attacking alien forces, and you'll put your skills into play across more than 30 campaigns. There's a huge list of aircraft for you to tame ranging from helicopters and planes to high-tech hovercraft. With 100 vehicles in all, deadly enemies, and 3D graphics, ECHELON is one far out trip through the solar system.
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...
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...
Beware
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...
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...
