Recent reviews by Kai Leroy

This might be the most fun game I've played this year, if not in recent years.

Echo Point Nova is an open world movement shooter with a beautiful hand-crafted world. There's a pretty good selection of weapons, perks and powers that help you traverse the world and fight enemies, blah blah yaddi yadda who cares.

You can headshot a dude mid-flip after riding your hoverboard off a cliff and falling several kilometers just to quadruple jump above a giant flying quadrocopter and kill it with a well placed magdump from an automatic Glock.

If any of the aforementioned insanity starts appealing, go buy it. It consumed several days of my life and I want more. It's the best open world game I've played in the last couple years, and with how many there are, it should tell you a little something about this game.

It has excellent movement, fun gunplay, absolutely bonkers builds and freaking voxel based destruction. 11/10, would crash into a guy on a hoverboard to throw him off a cliff again.

I really, really want to like this game. I loved the first one and this seems like more of it, if not a direct upgrade. But this game has ZERO excuse to have the load times it does. It's absurd how it takes up to a minute to load a single cutscene, 15 seconds to load a single menu and 5 seconds to load objects and people when you walk into a separate zone. It shouldn't even matter whether the game is installed on HDD or SSD, it shouldn't matter which graphics settings I choose (and in fact, it doesn't, because lowering those doesn't help), it just shouldn't run like this. Hell, it feels like the game is mining crypto on my PC while running.

This is probably the best free story mod you'll play, not just for Half-Life series, but any game, period. It feels at the very least like the "that one mod Valve would hire modders for", and at most like something Valve would make themselves. It perfectly understands and employs Valve's design philosophy and generally feels like one of the Episodes rather than a free expansion. Combat is fun, dialogue is full of personality, set pieces and new mechanics feel fresh and entertaining as if you've never played a Half-Life game before.

Stop reading reviews and try it. It's absolutely worth your time and, I'd say money, but it's free.

Good thing I bought it BEFORE it started to cost literally half my monthly salary.

Next time you decide to pull off something like the price increase in Russia, think carefully about how maybe, just maybe you're alienating a chuck of Russian people who are actually against the war. You could show your support without being an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to ordinary people who have and want nothing to do with this war and who never wanted all this to happen.

This is, first and foremost, a sandbox sim. It has no end goal, no clear objectives, and the gameplay loop boils down to "make money to spend it to make more money faster".

And yet this would say so little about the game. The physics, the music, the atmosphere and many, many other things are so well done I spend hours upon hours just mining. Hell, this game is such a time killer I sometimes spend my mornings eating breakfast and mining before work, just because it's so pacifying.

If you're looking for a relaxing (and sometimes very urgent) space experience - this is it. The price is laughably low for such an experience. An easy recommend for any space fans out there.

If you want a strategic game where the outcome is reliant fully on your and your opponent's actions, move along. This is nothing more than a glorified RNG-fest in a "strategic" game wrap.

Best "being sexually harrassed by three giant beetles and a jellyfish" simulator.

So, where do I start...

Speaking from a technical standpoint, this game is pretty impressive. Even though the graphics aren't the most impressive ones, the seamless transition between planets and space is wonderful. Flight controls are pretty deep and are pretty easy to learn, but very hard to master. Music and sound effects are pretty decent too, so that's something. Ship building is rather unusual I'd say, because it has many layers, from basic "buy new modules" to more advanced (and more interesting) "calibrate your hull", where you can get rid of some things in favor of the other (like sacrifice rocket slots for more cargo bay).

Now, to the main problem I have with this game (which I wish I realized sooner and refunded the game, but even the 1.5 hour demo wasn't enough for me to understand it)...

If you start as an independent pilot, you're basically cloaked for an eternity. Let me explain.

Imagine living on near the border of a county that wages war with that bordered country. Bullets and bombs flying everywhere, soldiers running left and right, but you... You didn't side with either faction. So one day, you go all "yeah, I'll probably go out, see what's up, maybe drop by a grocery shop to buy meself some milk". And guess what? That's exactly what you do with no one batting an eye, asking what would a civilian do on a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BATTLEFIELD.

If you start as an independent pilot, there's no danger. Pirates don't exist, and two major factions simply don't give a slightest damn about who you are and what you are doing. So here's your gameplay options:

-Mine asteroids, which means: fly up to an asteroid, press a combination of keys, go make yourself tea or something, hang out with friends, get drunk and call your ex, the game won't care and you'll end up with a full cargobay of precious minerals, safe and sound
-Trade, which means: buy a random ware (I mean it, there are no production chains or station types a-la X3/Unending Galaxy , which defeats the purpose of knowing where you can buy specific things), spend half an hour staring at your star chart looking for a place to sell it, finally realize this is all pointless and go back to mining
-Combat (read: piracy). I don't know why you would ever do that because you can't capture ships that you could sell for a good price, and the resources NPC ships drop can be acquired by mining which is far safer

There is one thing that makes all of those irrelevant, however, which is

-Doing contracts. Those are HILLARIOUSLY overpriced in your favor, and something like "refuel a spaceship" mission, which is a "jump to location, wait until you're in range, press one button" type of mission pays you 50k on average. This takes you a little more that two minutes. For comparison, you'd have to spend about ten minutes to mine three cargobays of ore from asteroids (those would sell for about 60k). There are some pretty interesting missions, or you'd think so, until you start breaking them down and they all happen to be on a "kill X mobs missions" level of bad MMORPGs.

You can also contact other "pilots" and sell them stuff/ask them for information. They will either rip you off completely or give you coordinates for a box of resources that you could mine anyway. Oh, and did I mention that you can't recover cargo without a mining beam (which can be installed, but it's installed into an equipment slot, and in the beginning, you could install much better things in there as a combat pilot)? Yeah, I didn't. Live with that, my dear rookie pirates, just another reason to not go full combat in this game.

Oh, and I forgot about the story. Probably because it's completely irrelevant and the game doesn't make you care and it doesn't affect you anyway.

So here I am, sitting in front of my screen 7 (read: about 10, because they allow you to carry save files over from the demo) hours later with a fully equipped mining ship asking myself "what's next?".

The answer is pretty simple: nothing. Grind for the next hull/engine/wings/battery/modules/whatever. This game had the potential to be an ultimate space game, but gameplay-wise, it's empty and unfortunately, there's no incentive to play it.

point-and-click adventure of the year, hats/10