Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance 3 or N.O.V.A 3 is the 3rd installment of Gameloft’s NOVA series and is a first person shooter.
Now I’m normally not into first person shooters, especially on tablets because of the lack of physical controls. But somehow Gameloft has taken this into account and I was actually able to play this version.
I will say however loading it on my Nexus 7 was a real PITA, first I purchased the game and I guess it downloaded a quick shell to download the rest of the game because after I launched it another 1.2gb of data had to come down. So I had to wait until the next day to give it a whirl.
24 hours later and it still took me another 20 mins to get into the game as it didn’t install the 1.2gb that it downloaded. Once I was finally through that it was about 5 to 10 minutes of painfully trying to get through the opening scenes which skipped, dropped out of sync with the audio and really was so painful I watch TV until it got through the opening.
Thank goodness once everything was loaded the game did play smoothly. Now I’m a newbie to the whole NOVA universe so I went in with fresh eyes, and now that I was through the painful loading I really started to get into the game.
You play the role of Commander Kal who has been called to Earth, which has evidently been abandoned by humans due to the Earth becoming uninhabitable. But there is an artifact to help transform Earth back to its former inhabitable state and that’s why their are a team of NOVA troops that you need to assist.
Now in the few hours that I’ve played I didn’t get very far, but a lot farther that I have in other first person shooters, and the game breaks down what you need to deal with into small bite size steps to ease you into what needs to be done.
It’s nice that the aliens all stand out so there isn’t confusion on who you need to shoot, and the targeting really makes it easier for a novice like me to enjoy the game without being a sharpshooter. My favorite part is when you zoom into the scope view to fire a perfect shot.
The graphics are phenomenal, and probably part of the problem with the intro, but you’d think those kinks would be worked out by now. All in all I’m glad I picked it up, there is nothing like ending your day blasting away at some aliens to release the stress of the day.
If you are into Sci-Fi and FPSs then I suggest you pick up NOVA3 it’s available in the App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android. Be patient with the loading it’s worth it in the end.