What’s that? Sorry, I can not hear you: I am having the time of my freakin’ life hovering via the air at 120mph on a hoverboard, popping a clear kickflip as my sniper crosshair intersects with the goon’s noggin—growth, headshot—and sticking the touchdown. The pitch for Echo Level Nova seems like my center school-aged thought of the proper videogame: a fast-paced, hyper cell shooter the place you’ll be able to double leap, wallrun, and skate down slopes whereas racking up killstreaks with an MP5 in co-op.
🔫 Nice weapons
🏃♀️ Wildly cool motion
🌎Open world
👨👨👦👦 Full 4-player co-op
🍖 Loads of meat on the bones
This sport by some means exists on our airplane when it clearly belongs in a greater actuality the place Tribes and Counter-Strike surf servers turned the dominant FPS template of the 2000s.
Echo Level is so totally different from each different shooter I am taking part in that it took a great hour to calibrate my mind to its quickness. Developer Greylock Studio makes an try to ease gamers in by doling out talents one by one—a pistol and double leap sneakers in room one, adopted by a grapple hook instantly acquainted to Titanfall followers—however any likelihood of mild acclimation heelflips off the rails as soon as you discover the hoverboard, the piece of equipment that the remainder of Echo Level’s motion concepts revolve round. Holding Shift to hop on the board takes you from zero to 60 in possibly a second, reworking outside arenas into skateparks and indoor mazes into wild F-Zero parkour tracks.
Echo Level Nova does not even faux that its story is necessary, however you study from chat logs that pop up at checkpoints that you have crash landed on a planet of sky islands and must combat your manner off it. There is a essential path that cruises via the marketing campaign in just a few hours, however the true meat of Echo Level Nova is exploring its kilometers-wide map, taking over more and more troublesome fight arenas and difficult your motion expertise. The entire map is on the market from the leap, with entry gated not by arbitrary ranges or gear, however by your uncooked boarding expertise.
Shred
Man, it feels so good to only cruise in Echo Level Nova. It is expertly tuned in small ways in which make cool stuff occur as a matter in fact, like touchdown completely right into a slope to realize pace or grinding across the partitions of a bowl-shaped enviornment mid-combat. But it surely’s deceptively accessible. Mastering Echo Level’s motion is hard, however in contrast to Tribes, it isn’t all that troublesome. The sport is remarkably forgiving with leap and grapple cooldowns so that you hardly ever fall off the map with out some solution to get better. In case you do fall, you’ll be able to simply respawn on the final piece of stable floor you touched with no penalty aside from some misplaced distance. And possibly largest of all, momentum is not a valuable useful resource. Even when you smack face first right into a wall at 60mph, you will get again on top of things in seconds.
It’s genuinely in contrast to some other sport I’ve performed, partly due to that max pace, but in addition as a consequence of how the whole lot’s stitched collectively. Loads of different FPSes with formidable motion and platforming are level-based or solely linear campaigns with arenas that pressure gamers to mentally “toggle” between shooter mode and motion mode. Echo Level is one steady circulation state. You are inspired to shoot stuff in your solution to locations or keep away from enemies solely if you would like. The way in which this map is about up jogs my memory extra of a Tony Hawk sport than the rest.
By default the world is in free skate mode, letting me wander round training dangerous jumps, testing the bounds of the grapple hook, or looking down Agility Orbs straight out of the Crackdown sequence. After I’m itching for a combat, I can head in the direction of one of many dozens of orange sky beams marking a fight problem. These are actually opt-in (you method a terminal and press F to start) Doom shootouts the place you need to consistently transfer and decide off escalating waves of troopers, drones, and mechs. Fight is the place you really get to flex.
Cruisin’ with a bruisin’
Nothing is cooler on this sport than doing clear laps round a battlefield, touchdown driveby shotgun blasts as enemy bullets fail to catch as much as you. Getting used to aiming at excessive pace is by far the largest ability examine within the sport, however one of many earliest perks you unlock is a bullet time capability that recharges the quicker you progress. The vast majority of the fight challenges are utterly optionally available, however you are rewarded for every one with both a brand new gun or a perk that introduces an improve or new transfer. There is a floor pound, a headshot-to-reload passive, and my favourite, a perk that heals one coronary heart of HP each time you ram an enemy off the map. Loads of the very best perks are simply sitting on the market amongst dozens of sky beams ready to be discovered—I began up a brand new profile the opposite evening and virtually instantly discovered a perk that triples pickup assortment distance I’d’ve liked to have in my first playthrough.
I have not even talked about co-op. Echo Level helps as much as 4 gamers, and it is only a good instance of how co-op ought to be carried out. You may be a part of pals from the primary minute of the sport, no hang-ups with tutorials, and drop-in/drop-out any time. All progress is shared, so you’ll be able to leap into pals’ video games along with your singleplayer save with no weirdness, and even issue is about per participant.
I did my entire first playthrough with a good friend, and whereas it is positively simpler than going it alone, it has that good high quality of co-op video games that are not consistently barking in your ear the place there’s loads of house within the soundscape to talk over the sport. As soon as we received into the groove of bouncing between islands and hitting up combats, we would spend the vast majority of our periods speaking about random nonsense, damaged up by the occasional “Man, this sport is so good” from both of us. The desires of 2007 gaming are nonetheless alive and effectively.
God bless the proficient groups making throwback FPSes or formidable episodic immersive sims, however certainly one of my favourite issues about Echo Level Nova is I haven’t got to attend years for it to be carried out—it is a full, surprisingly massive $25 sport that is not even near over after the credit roll. With out spoiling, simply know that there is a very enjoyable motive to return and retry fight challenges as soon as you’ve got overwhelmed the story.
I am completely happy with what Echo Level Nova already is, and Greylock is not even carried out including on: the dev’s roadmap says Steam Workshop assist is coming this yr, and 2025 and “past” will convey time trials, “tactical” mode, problem islands, new sport plus, a “rogue” mode, and extra weapons, enemies and perks. Dynamite stuff.
