Luna Abyss Review: Atmospheric FPS Meets Platforming Excellence

Earth has just the one moon, unlike most planets. It's even been argued that Earth is a two-planet system, which may be viewed as technically correct, but also no, the moon is the moon is the moon, and Earth only has the one of them. Until one day that changed, when a new moon showed up and brought with it a whole host of mysteries. Weird as it was, humanity still tried to colonize it and that it went about as well as could be expected, and while the inevitable failure seems like it should have been a cosmic "hands off," Luna got turned into an orbital prison where the inmates work off their inflated sentences by piloting artificial bodies on missions into the moon's depths. There's a whole lot wrong with the mimic-moon Luna, and the new prisoner Fawkes is going to get to experience it all.

Bad Moon A-Risin'

Luna Abyss is half bullet-hell FPS, half platformer and all Heavy Metal Euro-sci-fi weirdness. Starting off in her cell, Fawkes is overseen by her keeper Aylin, a giant head extruded from the wall that keeps an endlessly vigilant eye on the prisoner. Fawkes' body never leaves the cell, but her consciousness is transferred into a remote body, which not only keeps her physically safe, but is also a ragged thing that quickly gets replaced by something much more stylish and ethereal. The first body may be fully resistant to any fall damage, but magenta-ghost can be upgraded with abilities the base unit could never match.

The initial move loadout is your basic run-jump-shoot-crouch set of skills, although crouching while running also enables a slide that has a little more dignity than limbo-ing would when slipping underneath low-clearance laser barriers. Fawkes also has a capable gun with a decent fire-rate and damage, although if you use it too much, it enters a short cool-down period before it can fire again. This is the base on which all new abilities build off, but really Luna Abyss is about the scenery every bit as much as it is the skills used to see more of the levels.

While I'm not going into the story of Luna Abyss because I quickly gave up trying to understand it, what the game is actually about is platforming and shooting through fantastically atmospheric environments. The first area is all underground industrial, massive darkened caverns filled with semi-functional machines providing paths over the bottomless depths. The game leans heavily on a black and white and red color scheme, with moments of blue to indicate health and the occasional bit of colored lighting to remind us that, yes, this is a full-color game. The second major area opens up into massive caverns that feel like they're under an open sky, complete with trees and rivers of flowing sludge, but a bit of looking around shows that it's all contained underground despite the brighter lighting. While the path through each level is basically a line with few side paths, the scenery is always stunning.

The linear levels don't really feel like much of a problem thanks to Luna Abyss' focus on platforming, and while new guns are rare, new traversal abilities are fairly common. The jump becomes a double jump, which chains nicely with a dash that also doubles as the only way through pink energy portals. The dash doesn't negate bullet damage, though, but one of the few combat skills is a spherical shield that fully blocks all incoming projectiles. The action button gets a good workout on environmental items, such as coalescing short-lived platforms from blue fragments or creating an energy-hand to grab onto spiked balls and fling Fawkes through the air, and being relatively incorporeal, she can even possess the lifeless husks of certain NPCs. It's always a good time on the rare occasions a goliath with twin chaingun arms is available, and barreling down a monorail full speed as a weird rail-runner, hopping from one track to the next, makes for a nice thrill ride while it lasts.

What Luna Abyss is actually about is an excellent mix of platforming and shooting through fantastically atmospheric environments.

While the balance of the game is weighted towards the platforming, there's no shortage of combat to balance it out. The early encounters may not be particularly challenging, especially once you earn the ability to convert an enemy into a health boost when it's down to the last sliver of its life bar, but later areas aren't shy at all about pumping out what are basically mini-bosses whose heavy firepower is matched by their generous health bars. The bullets swarm thick and dangerous, and you'll need to make full use of Fawkes' mobility to stay out of their way with frequent resets back to the nearest checkpoint to try again on death. The encounters are nicely designed with a good variety of enemy types to handle, and the only real disappointment is in the gun selection.

The starting gun is fairly capable, but later weapons pack a bigger punch but are so limited in shots before overheating that it's hard to use them for anything other than their secondary function. The shotgun-equivalent, for example, can crack open blue barriers, while the sniper rifle destroys the purple ones, but the overheat cooldown kicks in quickly enough that it generally makes more sense to stick with the basic rifle, especially once it's gotten an upgrade. It makes sense that more powerful weaponry should be limited in some way, sure, but in a bullet hell game you don't want to have to deal with the equivalent of an overly-long reload period, and a couple of seconds is basically forever in the middle of a bullet swarm. The cooldown just feels like a relic from a different kind of FPS, and turns what should be some powerful weapons into little more than shield-busters. Although as long as they're out to break a shield, it never hurts to fire the two to three shots they can handle before switching back to something that puts out a more reliable stream of damage.

Closing Comments:

Despite this, from a gameplay perspective, Luna Abyss is a gorgeous, excellently paced FPS that mixes up the platforming and shooting in a way that makes it easy to keep on playing without feeling like either is getting repetitious. The story does come together eventually but by the time that happens, it's easy to have written it off, despite a few fun side-characters hanging around the abyss. The setting picks up the slack for the plot, though, and the levels are designed to make full use of every single one of Fawkes' abilities. Luna Abyss is a gorgeously atmospheric FPS that expertly mixes in its platforming elements, creating a dark and moody adventure where the response to each challenge is to look forward to what the next area has to offer as soon as its beaten.