Eco: A Game of Survival (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
52Eco is a 3D life sim, developed by Denton Designs, and released by Ocean in 1987. In the day it was criticised and praised in the same breath, for it's scope and for its difficulty curve. So as an intrepid bash-whacker l decided to give this a shot.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 25th December 2022 (Boxing Day) - Two different tries.
Narrated: 20th May 2023
Edited: 19th July - 12th Aug 2023
This game is, once again, yet another hang-over from watching the Lukozer review of this game many moons ago. He explained how to play it and so on Boxing Day 2022, I pulled it out for a quick try. That try lasted about 0.01 seconds, and so I tried again. The results of all of this was recorded, and was about 15mins in length. I then went back to the game on the same night, and got a good run all the way up to Mankind; which was almost a miracle compared to my previous attempts.
I think this one was narrated fairly loudly, or at least it seems that way. The HUD was deliberately left for the flying insect part of the video, as this means all the controls are lit up. I wanted to introduce the game gradually in layers, rather than throw everything at the viewer at the start.
Danscore:
Ecological simulations are few on the Amiga. Sim Earth, Sim Life, Sim Ant and The Shepherd being just a few examples. In most games, we can interact with the scenery, but in this one we can Become the scenery, if we don't watch our manipulation of DNA closely enough. As a small sandbox world, it seems to run quickly enough on a stock A500, with most things drawn with a blueprint, or are procedurally generated. Gameplay can be massively hit or miss, depending on if you survive for more than a few seconds per play. There is also no aim to the game as far as I could see, except for becoming a human and eating all the other animals. The player is left with two thoughts; firstly how difficult life can be - especially to get started, and secondly how Man will eventually dominate, eat everything, and become bored. So it's a cautionary tale , but one told not very well. The music is mocking and yet sounding 'desperate' and rather whiny. The graphics remind my of International 3D Tennis and all those rather lame wireframe soccer games. For 1987 this was ground-breaking stuff. Even today, DNA manipulation is still the hottest topic in the biological community, as it has the potential to fix autism and other forms of weak or damaged DNA, as genetic damage becomes more common. But the game is not Sim City, and players can't just muddle through for 10 mins and have a good time. In fact the game feels rather thin apart from the shape-changing aspects, and needed some kind of goal. I give it 5.5 out of 10.