Echo Point Nova channels the speed and energy of the best ‘00s Counter-Strike spaces, but this time you're the godless killing machine

It's been a hell of a year for shooters. Wild Bastards and I Am Your Beast have already been must-plays, but Echo Point Nova fell into my lap this week after it launched on September 24, and it is really something special. Think Titanfall 2's movement with the raw speed and wide-open play spaces of Tribes and you're halfway there, but it has plenty of its own ideas, so any comparison is reductive. 

I'm going to make another comparison though. Sorry. Despite the fact it's a single-player shooter where you'll do battle with snipers, jetpack-wearing goons and even humongous flying gunships, in its best moments Echo Point Nova feels more like a late-night Counter-Strike: Source server full of surf maps, except you're the player styling on everyone else. 

To understand that hyperbolic statement you need to understand the surf map. Surf maps - here's an hour of surfing ambience if that's your thing - were twisted environments designed not for murder but to let players rocket around as quickly as possible, butt-sliding gracefully down winding sloped maps that look like impossible angles but somehow improbably get you where you to the finish line.

Surf's Up

These maps started in Quake, but the whole surfing thing became prominent after the creation of ka_killbox by teenage Counter-Strike fan Charlie "Mariowned" Joyce. This map had skateboards that Joyce and his buddies would use to chase each other around with knives, and after he skittered across a roof to his death in a slide, Joyce correctly surmised people might be interested in trying to surf across Counter-Strike's twisted geometry. This became the basis of surf-the–gap and a few other surf maps (which you can still get here) and before you knew it, nearly everyone was putting aside their bombs and wirecutters to slip and slide through a series of different maps. 

The best of these maps were surf arenas built for deathmatches, letting you hurtle around at top speed. I was never any good at surfing, or Counter-Strike in general but there was a mechanical element where because Valve had never planned for surfing in Counter-Strike, you had to hold the strafe buttons and push yourself constantly into the geometry. This resulting weirdness propels you along at high speed to your destination, often a floating point in a featureless space, equal parts artistic choice and brutal technical constraint.

Echo Point Nova is set on a string of similar floating islands, a series of pseudo-arenas full of non-euclidean geometry and impossible spaces just like those surf maps. On your feet it moves like a shooter, but hold down the shift key - a sprint in any other game - and you're suddenly clinging to the back of a hoverboard, surfing walls vertically and horizontally while keeping your speed high to outrun the many many enemies trying to wipe you out. 

A grapple hook lets you grapple onto geometry, walls, enemies and even clouds as you move around the map. It's part of a host of changes designed to get you thinking about movement. Look down rapidly and you'll do a flip. Your own explosions won't damage you but they will toss you into the sky, but not as much as a mid-game unlock that lets you propel yourself into the sky through the power of, er, wind.  It's not parkour - it's nowhere near the finesse of Mirror's Edge or Titanfall 2's - but it requires the same level of precision and feels just as good when you pull off something incredible, which happens about once every three minutes.

Reap the whirlwind 

The co-op is a blast. While most co-op I enjoy requires tight communication and careful planning, Echo Point Nova is less about coordination and more about riding your literal hoverboard into a metaphorical whirlwind. Often the co-op is my friend Alex, screaming "Ramming Speed" as he darts past me firing a rocket launcher at a mech, or whooping together as I leap high into the sky to take out a skyscraper-sized dropship with a carefully placed sniper rifle shot to an exhaust vent.

An early perk gives you a slow-motion toggle, and a difficulty setting will let you slow time to a crawl any time you need it. It's not the only way to pull off precise moves, but I'm often rocketing around like it's an old Counter-Strike ScoutzKnivez match. Hell, the first sniper rifle you pick up is called the Scout and handles exactly like its Counter-Strike namesake.

But while Counter-Strike surf maps, for me, were an abject lesson in failure and getting styled on by more talented players, Echo Point Nova is pure wish fulfilment as you destroy the legion of enemies assailing you from all directions. You can and will fail - I found myself dying in firefights rapidly, often as the result of a mistimed flip or crashing into a wall and losing all my speed - but you'll always give better than you get, and it's always just the right side of compelling to make you hop back in. 

Earlier this year I said that I Am Your Beast was the best action game I'd played all year. While that game channels the style and magic of games like Hotline Miami, Echo Point Nova meets that quality bar despite its janky UI and almost nonsensical story. You don't need to know what's going on to enjoy Echo Point Nova… you just need to leap in and enjoy the ride.

Gibs

• Misultin Studios reached out and got me into a playtest of Exfil after last week's newsletter. The studio might be onto something. Exfil has four squads of six people venturing through the woods and trying to recover intel from a crashed helicopter. All deaths are final, and with four teams crashing through the undergrowth towards each other, the 30-minute matches are often incredibly violent, with first contact usually leaving several dead bodies scattered in the woodland. There's something pleasingly old school about the highly customisable server-based matching, and I'm nostalgic for logging onto my favourite Battlefield server every night rather than just clicking "find match" of an evening. It's still early days. Shots don't seem to do much damage outside of 100 metres or so, right now and there are sparse customisation options, but I like the detailed after-action report which lets you see who you damaged, who damaged you and the path every single player took before they met their ignoble end. This was a chuckle the first match I played, which I watched myself staggering through the undergrowth after my team got wiped out, somehow threading through enemy lines without realising before someone finally took pity and killed me. This is definitely one to watch for the future, especially if Misultin can boil the magic of milsim down into a thirty-minute match for the time-poor. 
• 343 Studios is renaming itself Halo Studios because naming the studio after a Halo character wasn't obvious enough, I guess. This news came alongside the news that the next Halo game will be developed using Unreal Engine 5 rather than Infinite's proprietary Slipspace engine. The team at 343 / Halo Studios were running up against some ancient code in their own engine and after how good Immortals of Atheum looked I'm pretty hype to see what a Halo game in Unreal Engine 5 looks like. Also, remember last week when Fortnite added an FPS mode? Halo Infinite is adding a third-person mode for some reason. 
• I was on PC Gamer's podcast last week arguing that Arma is asymmetrical co-op. Very on brand. 
• Being Dead's second album is very good. The whole thing is worth a listen, but I'm fond of Van Goes, which has the sort of too-lazy-to-exist energy that fits with most of my Sunday mornings.