Some people use point scales to score games. Others use letters. My review system is simpler: Would a game make sense alongside the “Guys will see this and just think ‘hell yeah’” meme? My name is Guys, and Echo Point Nova has made me say “hell yeah” more times than I can count.
Echo Point Nova is a first-person shooter in which you play as an explorer who’s crash-landed on a mysterious planet that’s overrun with murderous mercenaries. The plot barely matters. The real stars of the show are the planet’s structure – a vast series of fully-open floating islands – and traversal, which sees you hoverboard and grappling hook at downright deranged speeds across any surface you can see, horizontal or otherwise. If you are Old, imagine the skiing from Tribes plus Titanfall 2’s wallrunning.
Physics are floaty, but the game is so forgiving both in terms of checkpoints and your ability to panic-latch onto nearby surfaces that you’ll rarely feel frustrated when you accidentally overshoot your intended landing pad by roughly 1,000 miles. Oh, Echo Point Nova also has Crackdown-esque agility orbs, another key ingredient in making it the perfect shooter for me, personally. They’re not quite as central to the experience as they were in that seminal Orb Genre classic, but the principle remains the same: collect more orbs, spend less time on the ground.
Combat does not clash with all these high-flying shenanigans; rather it gels with them, providing a cool, smooth series of close shaves. The ability to temporarily slow down time, especially, ensures that just as you start to feel nauseous from encounters’ rollercoaster pace, you’re able to bob and weave between baddies and regain your composure. Individual enemies rarely pose much of a threat, but the game throws a lot of them at you, meaning that you’re always a few mistakes away from death’s door. That said, you’re also just a Tony Hawk 900 no-scope headshot away from a much-needed health pickup. Anything is possible if you dare to dream (or barrel forward with as much force as you can muster, heedless of the potential consequences).
I also appreciate the game’s structure: You’re given a series of objectives to complete, which lead to fights against gigantic, terrifying mechs (that you can grapple onto and skate up – fuck yeah), but you can also just do your own thing. If you see an ice isle or a forest biome or a lava spigot off in the distance and think “I bet I can launch myself nearly into the sun and then fall, screaming and on fire, like my boy Icarus, onto that,” you probably can.
I could complain about how some weapons feel less useful than others or a handful of similarly minor quibbles, but I won’t. Echo Point Nova is cool as hell, a game that punches so far above its weight that it’s in danger of collapsing into a black hole. It feels like an alternate evolution of the FPS genre, pieced together from raw materials that were discarded despite their obvious quality. They don't make 'em like this anymore – or at least, the studios that brought us Echo Point Nova's inspirations don't. I’m happy it exists, and I hope its developers get to make many, many more games like it (in addition to the other one they already made).
