This isn't technically an Indiescovery deal, as Edwin highlighted the stunning FPS Echo Point Nova when the demo came out. But the full game is out now, and as someone who suffers from chronic Titanfall withdrawal that will swallow anything that's a good wall-running, I bought it, played it, and am here to tell you why it's great.
Perched atop a vast, free-roaming patch of floating islands, Echo Point Nova does as good a job as any game at recreating the feel of TF's nimble yet intuitive parkour. Wall-running, double-jumping and grappling hooks are basically 1:1 matches. But it goes much further in terms of speed and scale, happily letting you hurl yourself off huge chasms of shattered rock and zip around arenas much faster than enemies can hope to follow you.
(The more fantastical setting and the ability to chain, frictionless boomslide also bring to mind James' other beloved but essentially dead action shooter series, Tribes. No, you (crying)
The shooting itself is decent enough. The guns are oddly subdued in design but fire with a satisfying crunch, and the enemy fodder quickly morphs from clumsy, leg-wielding losers to flying machine gunners and the same kind of hoverboard-wielding guys who amplify your own movements. Still, the traversal is always the star of any encounter. Moving slowly is suicide, and running on the ground is death by misfortune at best, so fights are won by buzzing around like an angry snowboarding wasp. Get there fast, shoot a mercenary mid-slide, grab a tree to quickly change direction, blast another, ramp down a fallen pillar, magdump a giant shuttle as you fly over it, gain so much speed on the way down that you knock the next guy to death, that sort of thing.
There's no shortage of fast-paced shooters, and since we're already making comparisons, there are touches of modern Doom and Ultrakill in how killing enemies reduces the health and ammunition needed to continue the carnage. Still, the sheer scale and speed of Echo Point Nova's air combat feels different, as does its vast open world. If there are any gates or railways here, I didn't see any, so once the tutorial has finished arming you, there's nothing to stop you exploring at 200km/h.
Armed or unarmed, this is a pleasure in itself. You're heavy enough to feel like a real object, but light and agile enough to easily maintain momentum through a chain of jumps, runs, and grapples. So being thrown cleanly from platform to platform is a tactile pleasure. I've occasionally found myself surfing just to cool off after a tough battle, but from what I've played so far, even the “Hard”-rated battle bursts don't break a sweat.
This is partly due to the inherent absurdity of your hoverboard-mounted fighting style, and partly due to the fact that Echo Point Nova has a sense of humor when it comes to bad guys. The airborne guys resemble Moore-era James Bond dudes, with their comically exaggerated flailing when hit, and when some of the ground forces deploy jump pads to get some air themselves, their flight arcs are accompanied by a cartoony dive-bomber sound. Lower-level enemies can also accidentally step on these pads, sending the unprepared fool flying into the sky and replacing those sound effects with a surprised scream.
I'm less enthusiastic about the cellophane-thin story and occasional glitches – more than once my perspective randomly spun 90 degrees, which wasn't the kind of crazy action I had in mind. But overall, Echo Point Nova proves to be a quick and fun time-waster. It's on Steam right now, with a 10% launch discount.