God of War is here – and it’s no joke. A review of the action game Echoes of the End after patch 2.0.

Echoes of the End, upon release, became an example of how not to release a game. It’s all the more surprising that it took just three months for the small Icelandic studio Myrkur Games to transform a crude collection of ideas and clunky code into an adventure that can now be described as “God of War at home”—still with irony, but no longer with malice. So is it worth your time? We find out in our review.

Classics without revelations

Echoes of the End takes place in a world called Ema—a harsh and cold land inspired by Icelandic landscapes. The Emian Empire once flourished here, its power based on a combination of technology and the magic of the ancient Guardians—stone colossi that held the world’s life force. After a civil war, the empire collapsed, leaving behind only fragments—disparate settlements and states desperately fighting for control over the remnants of its former might.

One such fragment was the land of Noi-Siruv, the homeland of the protagonist Rin and her half-brother, Cor. Nearby lies the hostile Reigendal, home to the Dahlians, a people who dream of reviving the empire and harnessing the energy of the Guardians.

Rin is one of the “last ones”—people capable of directly manipulating ancient energy. Their power is innate, but unstable: one wrong move can lead to disaster. Therefore, people like Rin are feared and shunned. She lives in seclusion and, along with her father, guards the Guardians, fulfilling the role of keeper of balance.

After her father’s death, Rin continues his legacy, patrolling the surrounding area with her brother. During one of their forays, they witness an attack by Dahlians determined to destroy one of the Guardians. Trying to protect the monolith, Rin engages in battle with Zara, a wielder of the same power as her, but serving the enemy. The skirmish ends in defeat: Kor is captured, and Rin herself miraculously survives.

She is rescued by scientist Abram Finley, who arrived from the neighboring settlement of Mir-Seya. He claims to have known her father and went to Noi-Siruv when he stopped receiving letters from him. Abram becomes Rin’s partner, helping her recover and continue her journey to save her brother and stop the Dahlians.

The game’s lore is revealed through notes, journals, and relics that Rin finds in chests while traveling through picturesque, albeit linear, locations with minor side branches. Some of these contain intriguing insights into the peoples of Ema, the Guardians’ technology, and their connection to magic, but most merely provide a sense of depth without affecting the narrative. The campaign is divided into 10 chapters, each with its own theme and visual mood—from volcanic caves to snowy plains.

Vaguely beautiful

Overall, the locations are atmospheric and sometimes truly impressive in their expansive landscapes. Despite the noticeable increase in assets, each zone is distinct from the previous one—in architecture, climate, and set design. There’s enough variety to keep you from getting tired of the same old sights throughout the 12-hour campaign.

Meanwhile, the visuals remain extremely uneven. Some scenes impress with their level of detail and meticulous lighting, while others betray their budget-friendly nature, with muddy textures and jagged geometry. Echoes of the End tries hard to look like an expensive blockbuster on par with Sony exclusives, but it’s clear that the small Icelandic studio—40 people, not counting the dog—doesn’t have the resources.

This is especially noticeable in the animations. In some scenes, the characters’ movements and facial expressions appear convincing, while in others they lose their naturalness, sometimes creating an “uncanny valley” effect. This is particularly noticeable on the face of the main antagonist: she is visually attractive, but in some scenes her overly wide, almost porcelain smile looks unnatural and even a little frightening.

The main problem with the animation is the lack of a sense of weight. Rin often seems to glide across the surface, with little sense of physical inertia or reaction to the surroundings. This makes the movements seem implausible, and the eye is drawn to these inconsistencies.

Technically, the situation is similar. Performance has improved significantly since the patch, but it’s far from stable. With an RTX 4070 Super and Ryzen 5 7500F, the game averages around 40-45 fps without upscaling, while DLSS in “Quality” mode pushes it up to 65-70 fps. This is perhaps the worst-optimized game I’ve played this year—and in the meantime, I’ve tried almost every major release, even those I haven’t reviewed.

The only benefit of this optimization is that it’s December, and I’m not cold: while I’m writing this review with the game running in the background, the graphics card is confidently heating the room, hitting 99% even when paused. The graphics look decent, but it’s far from feeling like “next-gen.” It’s scary to imagine what awaited players at release, but to the developers’ credit, I encountered no serious bugs, and the only crash occurred during the final battle.

Heroine of Might and Magic

Despite the world’s beauty, free exploration is impossible. Echoes of the End is based on a highly linear structure that rarely lets the player stray beyond the designated path. This linearity is almost tangible, manifested in illogical cliffs and invisible walls.

The narrative, however, remains sluggish. The story moves steadily, but lacks any escalating drama or tangible turning points. At launch, the narrative also suffered technically: players complained of desynchronized cutscenes, missing audio, and frozen characters, making even the simplest emotional scenes feel awkward.

These days, there are almost no such problems left – I only encountered the same script phrase repeating itself the second time I passed a certain area in Chapter 4.

Importantly, the script remained unchanged with the patch: the developers didn’t rewrite any dialogue or add any new scenes. Therefore, the plot remains the same—functional, devoid of vivid emotions and unexpected twists. Echoes of the End tells a story that exists for the sake of the game itself, not the other way around.

It, like its characters, doesn’t impress with depth or uniqueness, but it’s also not repulsive, providing enough motivation to simply get from point A to point B. Ultimately, the plot here is far from the most engaging part of the adventure.

It’s much more engaging to watch Echoes of the End in action. The combat system is simple, yet varied enough to keep things interesting. It’s based on melee sword attacks, augmented by magic—essentially telekinetic moves that allow Rin to knock enemies away, hurl objects at them, and harness the power of the Guardians in combat. Combining physical and magical attacks allows for creative takedowns: knocking them off ledges, hurling them into walls or each other, lifting them into the air, and slamming them back down.

The core mechanics are the familiar light and heavy sword strikes, dodges, and parries. The fluidity of the movements, combined with a slight clumsiness, is reminiscent of the original Dark Souls, and the lack of stamina adds a dynamic element to the system. At times, Rin literally flies up to strike, unwittingly reminiscent of God of War (2018), and the ability to parry even attacks from behind allows for confidently withstanding multiple enemy attacks.

However, you won’t be overwhelmed by hordes of enemies here. Most encounters are small fights against two to four enemies, and occasional boss battles. The enemy variety is also limited: Dahlian infantry, shield-wielding knights, mages, archers, several varieties of goblins, and insectoid creatures with similar attack patterns. So don’t expect any revelations here either.

At launch, the game was reported to suffer from animation lag and responsiveness issues: hits often didn’t register, dodges were delayed, and parries were more a matter of luck than timing. After patch 2.0, these issues largely disappeared.

On normal difficulty, the parry window is wide enough to deflect any attack (except those marked in red), and the visual indicator around the heroine helps deflect even enemy projectiles that are out of sight due to distance. In short, life has become more comfortable, and smashing enemies is truly fun for a while.

However, most bosses remain easier than a fight with a group of five to seven enemies. Their attacks are slow and predictable; in the worst cases, I defeated some on my second try. A nice touch: even those with two phases and a double health bar have a save option, allowing you to start the fight straight from the second phase.

The only truly memorable battle is with the antagonist Zara—the others are, at best, mini-bosses. Even the second encounter with her Dalian accomplice proves easier than a similar encounter in the early chapters, thanks to Rin’s new abilities.

Patch 2.0 introduced costumes and relics, some of which are unlocked simultaneously. They allow you to customize your character’s appearance and simultaneously enhance her abilities: reducing the cost of magic, reducing damage taken, increasing damage dealt, or expanding her parry window. These are nice, but not critical, bonuses.

Rin also has four skill trees, allowing her to focus on her preferred combat style. However, the build system remains conditional: completely abandoning the sword in favor of magic is impossible—all abilities work together, and upgrades merely shift the focus. You can invest in health, new combos, or energy regeneration when parrying, or you can focus on magic. However, in either case, you’ll have to swing the sword to replenish your mana, which quickly runs out.

You can also develop your partner’s skills separately. Abram—like the local Atreus—helps in combat: stunning enemies with electricity, knocking them down, opening the door for finishing moves, and even holding opponents in grapple mode. But he’s important not only in battles. Abram’s abilities are also useful for solving puzzles, which form another significant layer of the game, alongside the simple platforming.

Take your time, think about it

Between battles, players can enjoy more relaxed exploration of locations, punctuated by short parkour sections and puzzles that require magical abilities—and a few brain cells—to solve.

The first tasks are simple: the heroine uses telekinesis to move blocks, create bridges, or open locked passages. These scenes are reminiscent of the early “god” puzzles from God of War—they don’t require logical feats, but they hold your attention.

Abram’s arrival brings new challenges: his ability to cast stasis allows him to freeze objects in time, which helps with puzzle solving. Two of the ten chapters also feature boat sections, where Rin and Abram navigate between locations on a boat, solving puzzles—Mr. Kratos, as they say, says hello.

Gradually, the heroine unlocks new abilities, like a double jump and a mid-air dash—also commonplace, but they give the developers the opportunity to introduce a new type of interaction in each chapter. This way, the game maintains variety without overloading the structure.

By the sixth chapter, tasks involving gravity manipulation and perspective shifting appear; in the seventh, Rin controls water currents, connecting them into a single system to open the way forward; and closer to the finale, the creation of an astral copy of the heroine and switching between layers of time come into play.

All of this is accompanied by simple, yet occasionally engaging platforming—like a budget fantasy version of Uncharted. There’s running along beams, swinging on ropes, activating mechanisms to overcome obstacles against the clock, and sliding on ice—in short, a standard set of tricks that maintain interest as you move from arena to arena, from puzzle to puzzle.

When trying to sum up my impressions, I’d say the puzzles are occasionally engaging, but not particularly inventive. They’re varied, simple, and not frustrating, but they lack depth and development—as can be said of the game as a whole. Some mechanics appear for just one chapter and then vanish without a trace.

For example, after solving a couple of water flow management puzzles, you won’t encounter them again until the very end. The developers clearly wanted to add as many types of challenges as possible, but these ideas rarely translate into anything truly engaging—it’s as if the studio was afraid of overcomplicating the game and ultimately simply didn’t polish it.

Diagnosis

Echoes of the End is a game that tries too hard to be more than it actually is. It desperately wants to feel like an expensive, seamless, linear adventure, and I can’t stop repeating: it truly is “God of War at home.”

Structurally, they are remarkably similar—a chamber narrative about the journey of two heroes in a harsh Scandinavian setting, interspersed with combat, platforming, and puzzles (some of which are literally copied), with a companion who assists in combat and offers guidance when solving problems. The division into chapters, the level architecture, the alternation of combat and short breaks, the gradual unlocking of skills that opens up new ways to interact with the world—all of this creates a sense of familiarity right up until the very last moment of the script.

The only difference is in the scale, confidence, and craftsmanship. There’s a distinct lack of experience, budget, and a modicum of ingenuity—things that would allow the gameplay to be polished or at least attempt to pull off a story. At certain moments, everything comes together well, and the familiar cycle of “arena—puzzle—platform section—arena—boss” works as it should, immersing you in the rhythm. But more often, you’re stumbling over the feeling of “they didn’t quite finish here,” “they didn’t quite finish here,” “they didn’t quite finish there.”

Ultimately, Echoes of the End lacks a distinctive identity that would allow it to be anything more than a budget copy of a major AAA blockbuster. It’s not catastrophically bad, but it’s not exactly good either—too many uneven spots, odd decisions, and minor setbacks prevent it from rising above the level of “merely decent.”

A project like this would be more at home somewhere in the PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass catalogs—as a temporary entertainment experience you can play through in a couple of evenings and delete without regret. And if you suddenly want something “in the spirit of God of War,” but more modest, the occasional 40% discount might be a good argument for purchase. Echoes of the End likely won’t anger or disappoint, but it won’t leave a trace behind—like a snack at a roadside diner that you forget about after a couple of hours.