Echo Point Nova plays like a dream. By that, I don't mean that it's a responsive, satisfying FPS with a lot of intuitive and smart movement tech (it is that too, by the way), but the act of playing it feels like diving through someone's dreams after they played far too much Titanfall, Tribes and Minecraft adventure maps. Despite drawing inspiration from some of the best in the genre, this one hits different, in a very good way.
Released in the last week of September, Echo Point Nova is the second game from Greylock Studios, the one-man-band outfit that gave us the excellent bullet-time shooter Severed Steel. The family resemblance is clear enough, with Echo Point Nova seemingly using the same glossy and (optionally) ray-traced voxel engine as its predecessor, but in many ways inverts the design. Where Severed Steel was about optimizing a path through a tight series of corridors and rooms and occasionally blowing a hole through a wall, Echo Point Nova gives you the skies and a pickaxe that obliterates everything but reinforced metal.
There's no story here, outside of 'there's powerful artifacts on these floating sky-islands, guarded by generic Bad Guys, shoot and grab'. The few characters that occasionally appear in unvoiced plot nodes you can find around the islands are mostly just there to point you towards the next objective or break the fourth wall, reminding you about mechanics you might have forgotten. There is no drama, there are no stakes. This is a game you play purely for the joy of play itself. Which is good, as it's a thoroughly joyful experience, punctuated with some spectacular mega-vehicle bosses that you have to board and tear down from the inside.
Gotta catch 'em all
So what's the draw? A sense of escalating adventure and chaos. Within the first twenty minutes you'll get your basic toolkit—a handful of guns, grenades, a hoverboard that allows you to frictionlessly slide across any wall or straight up vertical surfaces, and a grappling hook that lets you swing from anything (including clouds). You start powerful, and enemies feel fragile—everything grows from here. Winning multi-wave arena fights, exploration and secret-hunting rewards a drip feed of new weapons, upgrades for them (earned by hitting a kill target for that weapon), perks to customize your character builds, and hats which look fancy and further increase your perk capacity. It's a compelling loop even before you start the hideously moreish hunt for Crackdown-style Agility Orbs, further increasing your ability to stay airborne.
By mid-game you'll be a fragile yet unstoppable god of war, able to triple-jump, triple-grapple and launch yourself 50 feet skyward with deployable jump-pads. With a run-up, a ramp and a little ingenuity, you can practically fly, weaving effortlessly through gunfire. The nature of Echo Point Nova's combat (mostly against human-sized enemies, with bullets that have travel time) means that the faster you go, the more skill you'll need to land those shots, making it a nice balance. Sure, you could slow down, but where's the fun in that?
This is a game that almost never says 'no' to the player. Aside from a few objectives that require a certain power from a boss to access, you're free to go and do anything if you've got the skill and movement tech. Think you can plot a sequence-breaking route by grinding off floating rocks then grappling off a cloud and triple-jumping your way across the abyss? Go for it; the game will gently hint that you reset to your last checkpoint as you're getting way off the beaten path, but it will never stop you.
Friendly skies
While a great time solo, Echo Point Nova is even better in multiplayer. You can roll (hover?) with up to three friends dropping in or out freely, with enemy spawns automatically scaling to the size of the group. The overwhelming odds means that death can come quick, but rather than forcing the group to look for and revive a fallen teammate, the survivors can bring a fallen buddy back into the fight by killing a set number of enemies, encouraging even more daring play under pressure. A simple system, but it makes every second spent in spectator mode all the more exciting.
While I've enjoyed the game most with the difficulty cranked up to high and with no assists, Echo Point Nova is only as hardcore as you want it to be. On top of a spread of difficulty settings, there's a bunch of accessibility options, up to and including smart auto-aim that leads moving targets for you and a toggle to make the bosses stationary, automatically melee anything within range, and prevent you from falling off ledges. It's an impressively full package for a solo developer, and given the years of free updates that Severed Steel got, I can only see it improving. Oh yeah, and there's a level editor too.
I'm already itching to get back to the game and continue my chaotic kick-flipping co-op adventure through the clouds, but for now, I leave you with a wholehearted recommendation: If you've ever dreamed about zooming through an FPS, gliding across walls and through the sky, you need to check Echo Point Nova's demo, at the very least.
