Echo Point Nova Review
Echo Point Nova (EPN) is a fun indie game. I can’t stress that point enough. It’s seriously fun and seriously awesome. Buy it on Steam.
EPN is set on a hundred floating islands in the sky. There’re ruins, ramps, volcanoes, boss fights, and lots of enemies. Luckily, you get lots of guns to shoot them with.
First and foremost, you move around the world with a hoverboard and grappling hook. With the hoverboard, you can grind on walls, ride up vertical surfaces, and double jump (which you can upgrade to a quadruple jump with perks). The grappling hook that can latch onto anything: terrain, trees, enemies, and clouds.
Two paragraphs ago, I mentioned guns. You get a lot of weapons. A pickaxe, multiple pistols, SMGs, shotguns, rifles, snipers, and an RPG and a grenade launcher. From there, each weapon can be further upgraded by getting a certain number of kills to unlock scopes, suppressors, larger magazines, and stuff like that. The pickaxe is used to dig through walls, the ground, almost any material except metal.
There’re also powers: fire, ice, wind, and grenades. And you can slow down time, which is quite handy when the fights get chaotic and out of hand.
Onto the topic of perks. You gain perks by playing the game, and you get perk points by collecting hats. No, I’m not joking. There’s a lot of perks, ranging from an extra bullet in the mag, slowing down time when doing a backflip, reloading your weapons when you’re wall riding, the floor is lava, headshots only…you can tune the gameplay to how you want it to be so long as you have enough perk points to spend.
Character customization lets you change the colors of your suit, hoverboard, and grapple, and, of course, weapon skins and wearing hats.
Gameplay is king. The story is purely there to justify it. In fact, I don’t remember anything about the story. Also, the game is voxel based.
The firefights are constant action, especially the harder up in difficulty you get, with tons of enemies being thrown at you, bullets flying, rockets flying, all while you’re moving at a thousand miles a second whipping around and grappling and missing your shots. (Warning: you’ll miss lots of shots, so pick up the ricochet perk for your snipers.)
The only thing I would change about this game is either getting rid of reloading (so it’s like the original Doom), but it doesn’t take away from the game at all, it’s just my two cents.
The game also got a piece of free DLC: Under the Clouds, which is more of the game but on the surface with a new power and a new melee weapon and underwater combat, and recently the game got a new game plus mode too. The roguelite game mode is a fun challenge as well.
If you’re still not sold on the game, let me give you a slight spoiler for the end of the game: you go to space.
Go play it!