14 DAY TRIAL // A new Xbox One indie game has been revealed today, this time one that will surely pique the crowd's attention, because it's an isometric Kinect strategy game that is playable entirely by using voice commands, appropriately titled There Came an Echo.
Developer Iridium Studios has successfully secured funding for the game around a year ago, when their Kickstarter campaign convinced enough people to pledge support for their creation.
The voice-controlled real-time strategy game had to possess a certain special aural feature, which it does, in the shape of Star Trek: The Next Generation (among others) celebrity Wil Wheaton starring as a voice actor.
Iridium Studios is a small independent developer that has gone the Kickstarter way once before in 2010, with their unique role-playing rhythm game Sequence, which is now available on Steam.
Apart from allowing players to live out their life-long dream of ordering "Mr Crusher" to shoot people in the face, the game also promises engaging gameplay and a strong single-player campaign.
The story is set in the near future, and will have players assuming command of a small outfit of soldiers on a series of missions across various hand-drawn isometric maps.
Additionally – and this is where the game's potential lies – players can also invent their own custom phrases for each command, limited only by their imagination and knowledge of pop culture memes or cheesy one-liners.
Another prominent feature of There Came an Echo is the fact that the units will all talk back to you depending on what's going on, asking permission to help a squad-member in danger or just bickering between themselves.
The development team has released a work-in-progress trailer, warning that it's just a sort of tech demo made for the purposes of showing very basic movement, gameplay and combat, far from what the game will look and feel like once the development process is done.
Iridium Studios are planning to release the game for PC in June should all go according to plan, with the console version for the Xbox One to follow soon thereafter. Iridium is now a member of the ID@Xbox program, and There Came an Echo is scheduled to land on Xbox Live later this year, joining the team's previous game, Sequence.