If you’re in search of restraint, you’ll not discover it in Echo Point Nova. Within the primary half-hour of the sport, you’ll end up geared up with a hoverboard able to climbing any vertical floor, a grappling hook that may latch onto clouds, and a triple soar. This recreation doesn’t maintain again the products.
Echo Point Nova is an open-world FPS that provides practically whole freedom. Once you’ve obtained your primary loadout, you’re free to discover the big map of a whole lot of floating islands and enemy bases. There is a narrative, delivered by way of in-world textual content popups, however you’ll seemingly miss a lot of it as you’re hovering over an ice mountain making an attempt to dive-bomb an enormous robotic. It is an untethered energy fantasy.
The freedom to discover calls to thoughts Breath of the Wild – actually, you’ll be astonished at what this recreation permits you to do – although don’t anticipate to be completely shocked by the presentation or artwork design right here. Stylistically it has extra in frequent with enviornment shooters of the early 2000s, with particular Unreal Tournament vibes. But in contrast to these multiplayer-centric shooters, Echo Point Nova is extra all in favour of offering a satisfying journey that shortly turns you right into a god.
The recreation’s singleplayer marketing campaign has you bounding from one island to the subsequent, clearing out nests of enemies. For every one cleared, you would possibly unlock a brand new weapon — anticipate normal fare like SMGs, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles — or a brand new perk, like one which permits you to butt-slam enemies in a big explosion. There are dozens of those challenges, sufficient to maintain you busy for a number of hours, and finishing every one makes you much more impossibly highly effective. I discovered myself strapped with round 15 completely different weapons and 10 perks to choose from after simply 5 hours. I used to be drowning in sources with which to dish out punishment.
The enemy bases do ramp as much as meet your capabilities, although. Deeper into the sport I began going through off in opposition to 50-foot mechs and hover tanks. There are even Shadow of the Colossus-style boss fights, the place you swing your self onto an enormous, shifting monstrosity and try and take out weak factors whereas dodging an endless rain of enemy fireplace.
All of this labored surprisingly nicely on a comparatively underpowered gadget (on this case, a Steam Deck), which ran the sport at a blazingly clean framerate. When taking part in on the Deck or with a controller, the sport supplied some beneficiant goal lock-on, permitting me to drag off some sick mid-wall-grind headshots that made me seem much more gifted than I’m.
Heck, you may even convey a buddy alongside to witness your splendor, because of on-line co-op via the entire marketing campaign. I discovered this characteristic additionally carried out with out a single hitch, regardless of the sport’s pace and several other thousand miles between me and my compatriot. It’s straightforward to see why some individuals could have missed the boat on Echo Point Nova when it first dropped again in September. For one factor, the title is terrible. But for one more, there isn’t actually an analog for this recreation. It kinda stands alone as a weird mash-up of among the finest video games ever made, one that offers you so many toys to play with that you’d assume the tip result’s merely chaos. But then you definitely begin questioning to your self: Yeah, why can’t I grapple onto clouds in Breath of the Wild?
Echo Point Nova was launched Sep. 24 on Windows PC. The recreation was performed on PC utilizing a duplicate of the sport bought by the creator. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media could earn commissions for merchandise bought by way of affiliate hyperlinks. You can discover extra details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.
