The complete beginner’s guide to Echocalypse

Set in the aftermath of a global apocalypse, you play as the ‘Awakener’, and set out to save your little sister, Rayna whose deteriorating condition is somehow connected with the Echo Crystals and was exacerbated by the enigmatic Order of Raspatarta. To accomplish this you command ‘Cases’; humans that have somehow bonded with mysterious objects called ‘Echo Crystals’. Naturally, like many anime-themed games, you’ll be challenged to recruit as many of these girls - because they’re all girls - as possible to find your sister, the legendary relics that are fuelling the intrigue and uncover the truth behind the setting and its story.

While Echocalypse isn’t necessarily anything special when it comes to the story - you’ve probably seen the ‘people with special powers ostracised and chucking around big energy balls’ thing a million times by now - the lush anime cutscenes are pretty impressive. Even when compared to the arguably much more original and stylish Reverse: 1999, Echocalypse boasts more full-motion cutscenes. But, if you’re put off by the aforementioned character collect-a-thon aspects, Echocalypse might not be your game. Conversely, if you are then this might be your favourite game of 2024, as the title boasts dozens of varied Cases you can choose from. Notably, at a time when AI images are becoming more popular, these characters boast unique designs from a vast portfolio of artists.

In Echocalypse you command a squad of ‘Cases’, the aforementioned humans that have bonded with Echo Crystals. If you’re at all familiar with games like Reverse: 1999 or the also recently-released Cyber Rebellion you’ll already know how this works. You have characters with a variety of abilities, effects and indeed special moves, and the key to beating your enemies is to balance your teams effectively. Support, DPS, tanks and more are all necessary for different scenarios during the game. Admittedly, it can all be a little overwhelming to get familiar with these. Fortunately, since the game has been available early since 2022, we’ve already had the chance to go over some basic team set ups. Check out our list of the best teams of Cases, and our tier list to get you started! We’ll be keeping a close eye on their performance with this full release, so updates may be needed, but these should be more than enough to get you familiar with them.

In Echocalypse, battles will progress automatically with your units acting mostly on their own. As they fight they’ll build up a resource called ‘Rage’ which, when the bar is full, allows your fighters to automatically cast their special skills. These skills naturally form a key part of their status in your team, and you'll need to balance in characters who heal and do damage as well as buff and boost accordingly.

Each battle progresses through a set number of 20 rounds during which you need to defeat the enemy or lose. You'll lose points for each of your Cases that are defeated - resulting in diminished rewards. Echocalypse has a unique - and very helpful - feature which allows you to dramatically speed up battles by 2x or 3x if you want to blaze through them. As you battle and progress through the story you'll also unlock Relics which prove further special moves that show up as active skills.

In terms of active skills, you’ll need to build up Fusion Points, these are shown in the bottom right of the screen and need to be manually activated. However, they’re much more powerful than your automatic skills and can easily help wipe out squads of weaker enemies or do tons of damage to a boss. Each Relic provides a unique active skill as you unlock.

You’ll also need to watch the positioning of your team, as where they are placed relative to the enemy will affect who they attack and are attacked by. Fortunately, you only need to focus in a single direction, but standard advice applies…support in the back (or at least out of the line of fire), and stronger characters in the front.

Naturally, to build up your team of Cases you’ll also need to draw characters, which you can do from your headquarters. You’ll use S. Elementium to draw new Cases, and a variety of Mission Data currency to level them up. It’s all very straightforward if you’re familiar with this genre of RPG auto-battler.

As you progress you’ll be able to boost and augment your characters to level up and increase their stats, as well as unlock additional passives. This provides a two-way approach to building up your team of Cases. You’ll notably also be able to send out your Cases on mini-quests to accrue the resources necessary for these boosts, minimising grinding elements.

Overall, Echocalypse is a straightforward game. If you’re familiar with RPG auto-battlers this won’t present any major overhauls to the formula. If you’re not, well thankfully Echocalypse is one of a growing number of games that offers an in-depth prologue in order to inform the player of everything that they can do in-game. It’s well worth checking out, and hopefully this guide will help you decide if it’s your thing and check back over in future!

Want to find more games like Echocalypse? Check out our news for Dragonheir: Silent Gods and our tier list for the newly released Black Clover M to check out what’s best in these games and more!