Echo Point Nova Review

Movement Shooters are a subgenre of FPS primarily based around moving while you shoot. More accurately it's about returning to the roots of FPS and including freeform, fast paced movement with little penalty for jumping around like a jackrabbit as opposed to more tactical shooters where movement often affects aim and recoil, and you're meant to take it more slow. Echo Point Nova is one of these movement shooters.

I saw this and decided to play it on a whim. Looked cool. It was pretty cool. If you don't feel like reading the rest of this I'll say I recommend it, both on the high class route and on the high seas route.

The narrative of SPN is that you're a space guy on a space rock doing space things and blah blah blah that's not terribly important. The main story exists purely as another form of progression. I won't say the main missions are bad, a lot of them are actually really fun, but there's 0 pressure the game puts on you to actually follow through with it. Actually, it outright tells you that you can go have fun exploring and just ignore all this shit if you really want.

That being said I beat them all and that's when I decided that I'd played enough to formulate a review. So where to start? Well I guess I could describe the movement.

Movement is based around a mixture of using doublejumps, grapple hooks, and a cool hoverboard that basically grinds on fucking everything short of lava. It's very easy to get the hang of, which I see as very intentional. One thing I always thought was just how easy it was to use all of this together, it's a very forgiving set of mechanics.

Particularly with regards to the hoverboard you can pretty much grind on anything and not have to worry about speed buildup in the slightest. You can grind straight up walls, kickflip off a wall to restore your double jumps and grapples, there's nothing really preventing you from just riding your little hoverboard everywhere.

Oppose this against, say, Tribes games where skiing and explosive jumping is its own skill to learn entirely. You can't just ski, you have to ski in a very specific fashion to not end up stalling. Similarly, you can't just toss an explosive at your feet because you have to account for angle and health loss.

EPN is much more forgiving in this regard. Slam shift and you're skiing, use an explosive and you're up in the air without any penalty other than the resource you naturally needed to spend to use it. There is a momentum you can build up and there is penalties for slamming into a wall the wrong way but it's all generally very forgiving so that people can get used to it as fast as possible.

The whole game in general is kind of like this, it's fairly easy and I was playing it on the most difficult modes. Even if I screwed up it usually wasn't too hard to recover health because health pickups are basically everywhere, and while enemies are varied they're also predictable by design. If there was any one thing it felt like the game was punishing more than anything else, it was standing still and being static. Every single enemy is designed to punish you more the longer you're standing still.

So as long as you're zipping around, generally it's hard to get hit by shit. Even if you die you're usually not thrown that far back, if at all. It's all feel-good power fantasy and this ease is likely to compliment relaxing co-op play which the game seems to be based around to an extent. On top of that if it was more difficult one of the problems that'd come up is that it'd be very difficult to figure out why you were dying and where to improve, considering how hectic the game gets you can rarely understand why you were taking damage to begin with.

One of the collectibles you can get is cosmetic hats, which while very funny is something you never see unless you're equipping new skills. Oh hey skills. And weapons, and agility orbs, and the general progression of the game as a whole. It's an open world and there's a lot of things to collect, you could call this the primary loop of the gameplay. You go to a place, kill some things or jump around some things, and by doing this you get a little reward that helps you kill and jump better.

Skills are pretty varied, but some are a lot better than others. Reloading your pistol 33% faster isn't very useful in a game where your weapons automatically reload when you're not using them, dealing 4x damage on a wind/explosive jump is very useful in a game where you can wind/explosive jump on command and one-hit the more massive enemies that start spawning later.

It does give you quite a bit of room to experiment, which is always a good factor, but I feel like most players will gravitate towards the same general options and end up ignoring everything else unless they just have the skill points to spare. At the very least I'd be genuinely surprised if anyone passed up the 4x damage after getting the wind powerup.

Weapons are a little samey, the majority of your arsenal is comprised of things that shoot bullets. That sounds hilarious without the proper context, but let me put into perspective the games like Quake have a large variety of things to shoot like rockets, grenades, nails, electricity, giant globs of plasma, and 'rails' or whatever the fuck those were. And that's not even the most varied it can get!

In comparison EPN's weaponry takes more inspiration from CoD or maybe Titanfall. Everything shooty shoots bullets aside from the RPG and grenade launcher which both effectively do the same thing and only one can be equipped at a time anyways. This is pretty bland, I stopped being terribly excited to test out new weapons after I had one of each because really the rest were just variations on a theme.

Ultrakill might be a more apt comparison here. You have stuff like a revolver, but also a different revolver based around shooting coins out of the air, but also a magnetic nail gun that influences enemy movement, but also shotguns that can be given various charge states, but also a railgun that has to charge up but releases a massively destructive blast... Everything is very different and swapping weapons swaps your playstyle as well.

EPN is more like pistol that shoots bullets, SMG that shoots bullets, shotgun that shoots bullets, rifle that shoots bullets, sniper that shoots bullets... The only real difference is their effective ranges which needs to be paid attention to since bullets have travel time.

The bullet travel time does kind of make the game lean towards having the RPG/Greande launcher be a lot more useful since you don't have to be as precise, on top of the fact that they do massive damage and pierce through shields. Only problem is that switching to them on the default control scheme is pretty difficult for the usual reason that trying to swing your left hand all the way on the other side of the keyboard to get to your 6th-8th weapons slot usually is.

If it were me I'd probably assign every single weapon to the 1-4 keys and just have you press twice to pull them out. Takes a little more time than the direct approach but that shouldn't matter in a game like this. That's another thing I vaguely remember Ultrakill doing.

Oh yeah and you can get weapon masteries by killing enough people with them. These range from incredibly useful such as adding more bullets to your shot or more explosive power to your weapons to being nigh useless like a suppressor. They're fun.

Agility orbs are scattered all around, usually in locations you gotta jump around to get. Kind of reminds me of Crackdown, a pretty cutesy way of progressing movement abilities by making you actually use them instead of just being some passive thing. There's not much more to say about them.

Oh yeah, this is an open world game. For the record I've shit talked them before because I think Rockstar makes boring games but really it works in this case because it lets you express yourself better with the movement mechanics. On top of that this isn't just a matter of going to a location to watch a cutscene and going to another location to take part in a 2 minute mission filled with irreverent bullshit and fdsfgs

No this is much more freeform and that's way better. There are arrows that point to locations for the main mission but there's no stupid minimap anywhere aside from your radar which only shows nearby chests and agility orbs. You're much more in the world and while there is a quick travel option you don't often feel the need to reach for it.

While it was fun to jump around some of the locations felt a little uninspired. It's like a fucking modern Mario game. You go from the grassy nature place to the desert place to the ice place to the lava place. It's very cheesy.

Until the lava area at least different movement mechanics didn't really start showing up, and even in the lava area it's mostly just avoiding the lava by using the ice power. Otherwise you can't grapple onto it or skate on it without going ouchy ouchy oooh it sure is HOT in here someone open a window

The arenas are pretty nice and varied. One of the main collectibles is to go around scanning places and this usually involves having to kill a bunch of things. Have yet to see an arena I really disliked, they're all pretty fun to skate around in. In particular I really enjoyed the look of the bossfights even if they were fairly easy.

Every single bossfight in this game is a giant machine that you have to skate around and shoot all of the weakpoints on. It's some real Shadow of the Colossus shit and man I can't get enough of it. The way movement gets directly mixed into the pace of the fight in such a simple way as well as the scale and theatrics of them made the whole experience really enjoyable.

Only problem is that they come, and then they go. It's great but since it's so simple and easy to get past there's not that much to enjoy. Fuck I'd play a game where entire levels are like this.

The regular enemies are pretty good too, graphically they all stand out from one another and I wasn't often confused on where they were or what types they were. You can be surprised how often this is an issue for FPS games. They're all a little retarded and are mostly scary for their firepower instead of their superior tactics, like the most they'll do is run around and fire a bunch of bullets at you but in different ways.

Also they say stupid shit a lot which is always a treat. HOPE YOU'RE READY FOR YOUR HOSPITAL BILL.

A smaller mechanic is being able to terraform the area. I didn't use this much outside of when the game calls for it. It doesn't seem very relevant but I guess it's nice to have.

I really can't get across the fun of EPN with just text, I think if you saw a bit of gameplay of it from a video or two the feeling of how it is to play would immediately get across to you. It's foundations are great and you could really mix its ideas with a wide variety of visual and narrative styles.

It's the sort of thing I could imagine anyone picking up and playing, especially people who aren't quite sure why this whole 'movement shooter' thing is as popular as it is. On top of that it's a great example of how an open world game can actually be made fun by playing as much into the open world aspect as possible.

The more underbaked parts of it are easier to look past since at its core is something very enjoyable to get into and keep doing. You know you're playing a good open world game when you just stop thinking about where you're going next and have fun purely running around seeing what's next on the horizon.

It's very much designed around that open sandbox feel where you can just do what you want within the game's confines. Guided enough so you don't get confused on what to do next, freeform enough so you can still make decisions on what that 'next' is.

I liked it you should play it

Oh yeah it's Christmas. This isn't a very good Christmas game maybe wait until January.