What's that? Sorry, I can't hear you: I'm having the time of my freakin' life soaring through the air at 120mph on a hoverboard, popping a clean kickflip as my sniper crosshair intersects with the goon's noggin—boom, headshot—and sticking the landing. The pitch for Echo Point Nova sounds like my middle school-aged idea of the perfect videogame: a fast-paced, hyper mobile shooter where you can double jump, wallrun, and skate down slopes while racking up killstreaks with an MP5 in co-op.
🔫 Great guns
🏃♀️ Wildly cool movement
🌎Open world
👨👨👦👦 Full 4-player co-op
🍖 A lot of meat on the bones
This game somehow exists on our plane when it clearly belongs in a better reality where Tribes and Counter-Strike surf servers became the dominant FPS template of the 2000s.
Echo Point is so different from every other shooter I'm playing that it took a good hour to calibrate my brain to its quickness. Developer Greylock Studio makes an attempt to ease players in by doling out abilities one at a time—a pistol and double jump shoes in room one, followed by a grapple hook immediately familiar to Titanfall fans—but any chance of gentle acclimation heelflips off the rails once you find the hoverboard, the piece of kit that the rest of Echo Point's movement ideas revolve around. Holding Shift to hop on the board takes you from zero to 60 in maybe a second, transforming outdoor arenas into skateparks and indoor mazes into wild F-Zero parkour tracks.
Echo Point Nova doesn't even pretend that its story is important, but you learn from chat logs that pop up at checkpoints that you've crash landed on a planet of sky islands and need to fight your way off it. There's a critical path that cruises through the campaign in a few hours, but the real meat of Echo Point Nova is exploring its kilometers-wide map, taking on increasingly difficult combat arenas and challenging your movement skills. The whole map is available from the jump, with access gated not by arbitrary levels or gear, but by your raw boarding skills.
Shred
Man, it feels so good to just cruise in Echo Point Nova. It's expertly tuned in small ways that make cool stuff happen as a matter of course, like landing perfectly into a slope to gain speed or grinding around the walls of a bowl-shaped arena mid-combat. But it's deceptively accessible. Mastering Echo Point's movement is tricky, but unlike Tribes, it's not all that difficult. The game is remarkably forgiving with jump and grapple cooldowns so you rarely fall off the map without some way to recover. If you do fall, you can just respawn at the last piece of solid ground you touched with no penalty other than some lost distance. And maybe biggest of all, momentum isn't a precious resource. Even if you smack face first into a wall at 60mph, you can get back up to speed in seconds.
It is genuinely unlike any other game I've played, partly because of that max speed, but also due to how everything's stitched together. A lot of other FPSes with ambitious movement and platforming are level-based or entirely linear campaigns with arenas that force players to mentally "toggle" between shooter mode and movement mode. Echo Point is one continuous flow state. You're encouraged to shoot stuff on your way to places or avoid enemies entirely if you want. The way this map is set up reminds me more of a Tony Hawk game than anything else.
By default the world is in free skate mode, letting me wander around practicing risky jumps, testing the limits of the grapple hook, or hunting down Agility Orbs straight out of the Crackdown series. When I'm itching for a fight, I can head towards one of the dozens of orange sky beams marking a combat challenge. These are literally opt-in (you approach a terminal and press F to begin) Doom shootouts where you have to constantly move and pick off escalating waves of soldiers, drones, and mechs. Combat is where you truly get to flex.
Cruisin' with a bruisin'
Nothing is cooler in this game than doing clean laps around a battlefield, landing driveby shotgun blasts as enemy bullets fail to catch up to you. Getting used to aiming at high speed is by far the biggest skill check in the game, but one of the earliest perks you unlock is a bullet time ability that recharges the faster you move. The majority of the combat challenges are completely optional, but you're rewarded for each one with either a new gun or a perk that introduces an upgrade or new move. There's a ground pound, a headshot-to-reload passive, and my favorite, a perk that heals one heart of HP every time you ram an enemy off the map. A lot of the best perks are just sitting out there among dozens of sky beams waiting to be found—I started up a new profile the other night and almost immediately found a perk that triples pickup collection distance I would've loved to have in my first playthrough.
I haven't even mentioned co-op. Echo Point supports up to four players, and it's just a perfect example of how co-op should be done. You can join friends from the first minute of the game, no hang-ups with tutorials, and drop-in/drop-out any time. All progress is shared, so you can jump into friends' games with your singleplayer save with no weirdness, and even difficulty is set per player.
I did my whole first playthrough with a friend, and while it's definitely easier than going it alone, it has that nice quality of co-op games that aren't constantly barking in your ear where there's plenty of space in the soundscape to chat over the game. Once we got into the groove of bouncing between islands and hitting up combats, we'd spend the majority of our sessions talking about random nonsense, broken up by the occasional "Man, this game is so good" from either of us. The dreams of 2007 gaming are still alive and well.
God bless the talented teams making throwback FPSes or ambitious episodic immersive sims, but one of my favorite things about Echo Point Nova is I don't have to wait years for it to be done—it's a complete, surprisingly large $25 game that isn't even close to over after the credits roll. Without spoiling, just know that there's a very fun reason to go back and retry combat challenges once you've beaten the story.
I'm thoroughly pleased with what Echo Point Nova already is, and Greylock isn't even done adding on: the dev's roadmap says Steam Workshop support is coming this year, and 2025 and "beyond" will bring time trials, "tactical" mode, challenge islands, new game plus, a "rogue" mode, and more weapons, enemies and perks. Dynamite stuff.
