A few years back, when smartphone gaming was still a fairly fledgling field, I had to move from one house to another. Moving is a tough time for gaming, since you usually don’t have your TV and your console and all your games and accessories in one place, and if you do, you probably don’t have it all set up. Lucky for me, I found a Halo ripoff for smartphones called N.O.V.A.: Near Vanguard Orbit Alliance, which I could play on the couch during any downtime I could find. As you surely know, along with Modern Combat, N.O.V.A. laid the groundwork for early smartphone games that delivered on everything but originality.
Fast-forward to 2017, when N.O.V.A. is a thriving franchise on its own and most people’s smartphones are about as good as their computers were a decade ago. Gameloft has nothing left to prove with N.O.V.A., but they do have an untapped market: people with very little free space on their smartphones. This is where N.O.V.A. Legacy and its 27 MB download size comes in.
It’s not magic, of course. It’s such a small game because most of it runs from the internet, meaning that you’ll basically be restricted to playing N.O.V.A. Legacy over a wifi network. If that’s how you do most of your smartphone gaming, though, N.O.V.A. Legacy is the real deal, and a great continuation of a great franchise. It’s called “Legacy” because it’s a slimmed-down version of the first N.O.V.A. game, but for newcomers and people who haven’t played the old game in years (like me), it might as well be a completely new experience.
Missions
The storyline in N.O.V.A. Legacy is pretty cool, since each mission ends exactly where the last one left off. This gives the story a continuity and makes you feel like you’re actually an important actor in it. As you complete missions, you win rewards that can help you upgrade your weapons and armor, with extra rewards for side missions (like hitting a certain accuracy rate or hitting a certain number of headshots).
Multiplayer
Since there are only 19 missions, N.O.V.A. Legacy could feel like a too-short game. Luckily, aside from the solid story, the game also includes multiplayer. In other words, for 27 MB, you not only get a full FPS story but you also get a free multiplayer FPS for your phone with infinite replayability. Just like you can for missions, you can customize your multiplayer loadout for maximum carnage.
While the story mode has an energy system (which can be the kiss of death for many a mobile game), the multiplayer wisely does not. This means you can play as many multiplayer matches as you want without having to spend a dime. Again, just make sure you’re on a wifi connection so you don’t run up your phone bill.
There are plenty of FPS games out there you can play on your smartphone, but there aren’t many you can play if you’re short on free space. For Android users (since N.O.V.A. Legacy is not available for iOS for some reason), though, there is N.O.V.A. Legacy. If you have 27 MB of free space and are looking for a free FPS for your phone, you can’t do much better than N.O.V.A. Legacy. Give it a try, and once you’ve trained up a bit come back here to challenge me in the multiplayer arena.
Download N.O.V.A. Legacy for Android
