Echo Point Nova

I put more than a few hours into Echo Point Nova half-expecting it to burn out after the opening rush, and instead I found myself still grinding wall edges and triple-grappling across sky-islands well past the point where I'd intended to stop. Developed by Greylock Studio - the one-person outfit behind Severed Steel - this is an open-world first-person shooter built almost entirely around the thrill of movement, and it commits to that idea harder than most games three times its size. The core toolkit tells you everything about the design philosophy. You get a hoverboard that sends you careening at speeds that make most shooters feel sluggish, a grappling hook that lets you chain direction changes mid-air, wall-grinding, multi-jump through agility orb pickups, deployable jump-pads, and a pickaxe that chews through most of the voxel-built environment. By the midpoint of the campaign you are triple-jumping, triple-grappling, and launching yourself skyward in ways the game rewards rather than punishes. The faster you go, the harder it is to land shots - which is actually a smart way to bake skill expression into a system that could easily become a pure power fantasy. Combat arenas are spread across hundreds of floating islands split into distinct biomes: desert, volcanic, and others, each with a different visual filter. Clearing an arena rewards a new gun or perk, which keeps the progression loop ticking without ever forcing a grind. The weapons and perks are worth talking about separately. There is real build variety here - a Super Style perk that triggers slow-motion whenever you flip on the hoverboard is the kind of absurd-but-coherent design choice that makes you feel the game understands exactly what it is. Boss encounters lean into that same energy: one early fight has you gliding over terrain to assault a massive mechanical enemy, swinging into its interior to hit weak points. The whole game runs on roughly two gigabytes thanks to smart texture compression, and fast travel is nearly instant - although in practice the movement feels good enough that you may not use it much. On the downside, the story is thin to the point of being negligible. Objectives are delivered via 2D chat bubbles at respawn nodes that clip through geometry and require you to stop moving to read - which is genuinely at odds with what the game does best. Players who need a narrative hook to stay engaged will not find one here. Some also note that the movement can veer into feeling overly forgiving on default difficulty, with so many recovery options available that mistakes rarely carry real weight. Cranking the difficulty up fixes most of that, and the game makes this easy to do. Post-launch support has been consistent. Greylock has added new maps with developer commentary, new weapons, and a roguelike-style update that broadens the replay value beyond the main campaign. There is also co-op for up to four players if you want to coordinate the chaos. The Steam community sits at an overwhelmingly positive rating in English, which for a sub-three-gigabyte indie FPS from a solo developer says something concrete about what it delivers within its scope. If you clock in for movement shooters and have been waiting for something to scratch that Tribes-shaped itch, Echo Point Nova is the most focused version of that feeling released in years. It does not pretend to be anything else, and that honesty is most of why it works.

Alex · Scout Team

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