Sadistically Hard!
Very nice for a Sega Genesis title. It appropriately captures the look of the ocean with the water color and effects, the background, the rock and coral design of the level and the design of the various sea creatures you encounter. Ecco and the other sea creatures have believable and fluid motions
Controls: 7
While you can control Ecco comfortably for the most part, it's when you need to make precise movements that you realize that the controls are a bit clumsy for what you are expected to do what with dodging sharks, super fast lethal starfish, puffer fish and whatnot.
Story : 7
As I've never been able to completed the game myself I had to look on wikipedia to know how the game was supposed to play out. After reading it the story is rather interesting having to do with time travel and attempting to stop and alien race called the Vortex from pretty much eating your pod as they come to earth every 500 years to harvest the oceans. It is however sort of cliche with the whole aliens thing but if you think about it, there aren't that many logical explanations for almost all of the sea life in an area being sucked up into the sky. IT WAS AAAAALIIIENNNNNNSSS!!
Music: 9
Very deep and moody arrangement of genesis computer chip sounds that really do give you the impression that your in the ocean. I listened to the Sega CD versions music and I like that music more cause it's CD quality music that was composed but a lot of people seem to like the original genesis games music more seemingly only for nostalgic purposes than actually saying why it's better.
Sound: 7
The echoing sounds of echo location, the sounds that come from the different whales and and the sounds that generate off of the glyphs sound appropriate but there are other sounds in the game that seem sort of odd is the only way I can really describe it.
Difficulty Curve: 10
One of, if not THE hardest games you'll ever run into that isn't hard because of any game glitches or errors in level design, it's hard because the developers actually made it that way and are very sadistic. They obviously didn't expect many people to complet this game and the developers probably didn't either. Your constantly under a time limit when you go under water cause of your breath meter, the hit detection box is larger than Ecco so it's easy to get hit by spikes and different creatures, many of the creatures go through the walls and ram you, easy to get lost sometimes even with the ecco location feature and the game likes to put you into "death alley" situations where you have to get to the end as quick as possible avoiding all manner of different obstacles without dying and running out of breath. THIS GAME IS SADISTIC!
Gameplay: 7
Ecco the Dolphin while having good controls, sounds and graphics fails in the fun factor as the only real fun you'll have with the game is in the first 2 or 3 levels, after that it becomes a game for masochists as you try your hardest just to survive against all this opposition. You WILL die at some point in the game and you will have to use your exp from your many deaths in an attempt to memorize the level and what your supposed to do in order to save the trapped dolphins in many of the levels and make it out of the level alive without dying. If you save the dolphins in the levels they tell you how to perform improvements of your abilities while you'll have to save the dolphins again if you die at any time in the level. This xbox version improves on that a bit in that if you die you can go back to a previous point in the game instead of starting over which helps.
-Conclusion-
While the game is pretty to look at and it's fun to jump and swim around like a dolphin and the music is appropriate enough to draw you into the world, you will be quickly shot back to reality upon your first cheap death and you come to realize that the game requires an exceeding amount of your effort and time to complete and because of that it is just not fun at all to play. If they had lightened up on the difficulty and not been so steadfast in keeping nearly all of the people who play this game from reaching the end (of which i couldn't even find a video of online anywhere) Ecco probably would be a more well known and liked character. As he is now, he's only truly liked by the gamer who thrives on difficult games and the sense of satisfaction after completing a hard level and those gamers who only play the first two levels just to jump and splash around and actually have fun.
Tips:
Use Echo Location OFTEN. You can't see that far ahead of you and you need to use it to find your bearings and plan out what your going to do and where your going to go before hand and also so you can gauge the danger of heading a specific direction.
In the second and third levels use your echo to open clams for heath ups. Some do the opposite and damage you but they are few and far in between. This is actually critical for the 3rd of 4th stage otherwise you'll most likely die before reaching the end.
Find the dolphins in the stages that have them, the abilities they teach you when you gather all of them to the main dolphin greatly help! Especially that Echo Pluse like move (A then C on Genesis)