Titanfall and Tribes fans, don't miss skyfaring shooter Echo Point Nova

Not technically an Indiescovery-type deal, this, as Edwin already called attention to breathless FPS Echo Point Nova back when the demo came out. The full game has just released, though, and as someone with such chronic Titanfall withdrawal that I’ll ingest anything with a decent wallrun, I’ve bought it, played it, and am here to tell you why it rocks.

Echo Point Nova, which is set atop a vast, freely roamable patch of floating islands, does as good a job as any game of recreating the feel of TF’s nimble-yet-intuitive parkour. The wallrunning, double jumping, and grapple hooking are basically 1:1 matches. But it goes much further on speed and scale, happy to let you hurl yourself across great chasms of shattered stone and ping around arenas far faster than enemies could hope to track you.

(The more fantastical setting and capacity for chained-together, frictionless bumslides also calls to mind Tribes, that other Movement Shooter Series James Likes But Is Essentially Dead. No, you’re crying.)

The shooting itself is decent enough. Guns are oddly subdued in design but blast away with a satisfying crack, and enemy fodder quickly escalates from feckless, leg-using losers to flying machine gunners and dudes on the same kind of hoverboard that powers your own moves. Still, traversal is always the star of any encounter. Moving slowly is suicide and sprinting along the ground is, at best, death by misadventure, so fights are won by buzzing around like an angry snowboarding hornet. Zip over there, shoot a merc mid-slide, grapple a tree to quickly change course, pop another, ramp off a fallen pillar, magdump a giant mech while sailing over it, pick up so much speed on the landing that you clatter the next man to death, that sort of thing.

Obviously there’s no shortage of speedy shooters, and since we’re already on a roll of comparisons, there are touches of modern Doom and Ultrakill in how slaying foes drops the health and ammo you need to keep the carnage going. Even so, the sheer size and pace of Echo Point Nova’s aerial gunfights helps it feel distinct, as does its sprawling open-world structure. If there’s any gating or railroading up here, I haven’t seen it, so once the tutorial has finished kitting you out there’s nothing to stop you zooming off to explore at 200kph.

This is also a pleasure in itself, guns or no guns. You’re just heavy enough to feel like a real object, but light and nimble enough to easily keep up momentum through chains of jumps, dashes, and grapples. Cleanly launching from platform to platform is thus a tactile joy. I’ve sometimes found myself surfing around just to cool off after a tough battle, though from what I’ve played so far, even the "Challenging"-rated combat bursts don’t get excessively sweaty.

That’s partly down to the inherent ludicrousness of your hoverboard-mounted fighting style, and partly because when it comes to the bad guys, Echo Point Nova has a sense of humour. The airborne blokes look like Moore-era James Bond henchmen, complete with hilariously exaggerated flailing when shot down, and when some of the ground forces deploy jump pads to get some air themselves, their arc of flight is accompanied by a cartoonish dive-bomber sound. Lesser enemies can also tread on these pads by mistake, propelling the unprepared idiot skyward and replacing that SFX with a confused scream.

I’m less enthusiastic about the cellophane-thin story and occasional glitch – more than once my perspective has randomly rotated 90 degrees, which isn’t the kind of wacky movement I had in mind. But generally, Echo Point Nova is proving to be a zoomy good time. It’s out now on Steam, with a 10% launch discount.