Luna Abyss

Luna Abyss was provided by Kwalee for review. Thank you!

Narrative-focused single-player shooters are some of my favorites. I love the combination of action-packed shooting mixed with an engaging, interesting story. It's even better when the game takes place in a futuristic or sci-fi setting. That's what got me interested in Luna Abyss. The world looked beautiful and haunting, and the combat was filled with action. For the most part, the game holds up to what it was showcasing, especially when it comes to eye candy.

If there’s anything Luna Abyss excels in right off the bat, it’s the visuals. The game is beautiful, with incredible, varied settings doused in colorful lighting that almost perfectly illuminates the world around it. The atmosphere creates a haunting scene, highlighting the gloomy, abandoned mines, reactors, and towns. The use of red, blue, purple, and yellow lights feels like they hit the world just right, making each level look like it's framed in a photo. And while the outside areas don’t benefit as much from the lighting, the use of color in the actual landscape makes up for it.

It all adds to the intriguing world that Luna Abyss takes place in. It’s expertly crafted to highlight the abandoned, apocalyptic nature of the blood moon and its infinite abyss. The atmosphere captures the creepy vibes perfectly with the visuals, and is accompanied by some decent sound effects. It all comes together to create a gorgeously striking visual splendor that is just a treat to see.

Luna Abyss’s story ended up roping me in throughout my time with it. We start out as a prisoner named Fawkes, who is stuck on this moon doing work for the “All-Father” to reduce their sentence. We are managed by Aylin, a floating robot head that gives us orders based on what the All-Father wants. This means we will be descending into the infinite abyss, and in our first run down there, we ultimately awaken the eye and our chosen to fulfill a prophecy. This is what begins our descent into the crazy unknown, where we will have to fight corrupted monsters and complete the missions given to us.

Without spoiling too much, I will say the narrative grew on me, and even surprised me later on. I wasn’t surprised by too many revelations, but it was interesting learning about the All-Father and what truly happened here. What got me the most was the extent of the actions taken in the past that set the events of this game in motion. The voice acting is decent as well, which helps bring it together as we talk with the inhabitants and learn about their stories, while also getting caught up in a gigantic mess that we never made. I was genuinely hooked on the story to the end, and it will be worth sticking through.

As for the general gameplay, there are two parts to it: combat and platforming. I have a love-hate relationship with both of them, making me feel conflicted with the design of each mechanic and the scope of Luna Abyss itself.

The gunplay can be fast-paced and exciting. Just like a lot of bullet hell or boomer shooters, there’s going to be a lot of moving around, and it feels great to do that here. Jumping, dashing, and shooting enemies feels tight and energizing, and it can feel so satisfying to use finisher moves that replenish our health or deal damage to enemies all around them. And I’m really glad that the developers allowed us to autolock onto enemies with the left trigger. This puts a little less stress on actually shooting them and gives us time to focus on dodging the orbs coming at us.

There are some genuinely exhilarating moments, and when it all works, it’s great. With the soundtrack pumping, some of the combat encounters just hit all the right notes. And when that would happen, I genuinely loved it. Providing autolock and making all of the weapons not use any ammo, we need to pick up, keeps us focused on the action, which was a great decision on their part. The autolock is a little clunky, and I noticed the lock could go onto other enemies randomly sometimes, but it is great to have.

However, I was almost always brought back down to reality, which became more and more obvious further in the game. The weapons themselves feel great to use, but they are basic. There are only four weapons that we can use, and there aren’t any other ways to use them. No alternate firing modes or customization, what you see is what you get. This started to feel boring, since the combat encounters weren’t exciting enough to overlook it. And with each weapon only having one upgrade, which didn’t really feel impactful, apart from maybe shortening cooldown times, I just couldn’t enjoy myself fully.

On top of that, some enemies will require specific guns to actually kill them. They will either have blue or purple shields, which require the Shieldbreaker or Monarch’s Lance to dissipate. That brings up the other issue in combat: it’s not great to switch between weapons. There are two ways that we can do it, whether it’s using the Dpad or holding down LB. Using the Dpad is an instant switch, while holding down the LB button will bring up a weapon wheel and slow down time. Using the Dpad in the middle of a fight was uncomfortable when constant movement is needed, and I didn’t like time slowing down since it usually cut off my flow. If you are playing on a Steam Deck or using the Steam Controller, we can essentially fix this by mapping the Dpad to our four back buttons using Steam Input. This was my favorite way to switch between weapons, so I recommended if you’re playing on the Deck or with the Steam Controller. The game really emphasizes switching weapons constantly, and it just doesn’t feel great to do so with the default controls.

I would also say that the enemies were a little bit on the bullet-spongy side for my taste, but this could also be the fault of the Scout Rifle being a little underpowered. I just didn’t look forward to using it in the slightest, yet it was the main weapon I would switch to after I had gotten rid of the shields on enemies, since the other guns could only shoot 3 to 4 times before going on cooldown. It became a pain to use, especially in boss battles, since it would deal almost no damage.

There is some good to be found in the combat, but it definitely has some major flaws. Thankfully, the platforming is better. Movement in general feels great outside of combat. Jumping to platforms and dashing, while managing to create platforms and tethering ourselves to possess specific robots, was extremely enjoyable. The dashing can feel a little bit loose, but I rarely had any issues when platforming, jumping, and getting from A to B.

A lot of the high points here translated to combat, and moving around, jumping, and strategically putting up a shield to block projectiles felt great. The one big issue that I felt here was dashing. This could be because I have recently just played through another bullet hell game, Saros, but I missed being able to dash through projectiles. While the dash can cover some ground in Luna Abyss, it does not make us immune, so I would regularly still be hit with projectiles. I understand that this is a bullet hell game, but there were a few times where it became a little bit difficult to manage where all of the projectiles were coming from, so having a little bit of immunity during dashing would’ve been nice.

There isn’t much in the way of progression, but there are collectibles to find that pad out the story, crystals we can destroy, and health upgrades. These can all be found within levels, and there’s a nifty level selector that will tell us how many of each of these are in each stage. It will be up to us to actually go out and find them, and they are well hidden throughout the levels, so that is exciting.

Luna Abyss - Steam Deck Performance

Luna Abyss has its graphical settings, locked when you normally play, with only the ability to change resolution. At its default, the game looks great and runs quite well, though it will regularly dip down below 40 FPS in some big fights and open areas. Still, for an out-of-the-box experience, it’s quite impressive that they were able to optimize the game well enough to look this good and still run at a solid framerate.

However, I wanted to find a way to improve the experience, so I did. By using the launch option SteamDeck=0 %command%, we can check the game into thinking that this is not a Steam Deck, which will unlock all the graphical options we can change. The first thing I did was try to find the settings that are being used for the default Steam Deck preset, and it seems like they use medium settings for everything without any upscaling. For what it’s worth, I think the game looks fantastic this way, but there are a few modifications that I would make to enhance the experience a little further.

On the default preset, I noticed that the grass is shimmery, which we can fix by turning the Anti Aliasing quality to High. It isn’t too much of a performance hog, but it does help the world look less pixelated. I would consider this toggle to be a huge help, so I recommend doing this no matter what.

The bigger problem I faced was whether or not to use FSR upscaling. After testing all of the settings individually, I realized two things. First, going from medium to low had almost no change in performance with a worse-looking image, while medium to high had a better-looking image with significant performance drops. The middle ground was leaning towards the medium settings altogether, but FSR changes that. By turning it on High Quality mode, we can play at the high settings without dropping below 30 FPS nearly as much. It sounds like a great trade-off, but FSR upscaling makes the game look blurry. Even on the high-quality setting, the area is very clearly blurry.

So, I recommend playing the game with a few settings on High, but no FSR upscaling and a 30 FPS cap. Even at the lowest possible settings, there are still going to be fights and some areas that drop into the 30 FPS range. The only way out of it is using FSR upscaling, but I could not bring myself to use it because of how blurry it could make this beautiful game. It just wasn’t worth it.

Conclusion

Luna Abyss is a gorgeous and haunting shooter where the story hooked me in. I loved going through the levels and seeing the beautiful lighting and atmosphere, while the narrative hooked me in with some surprising revelations that I had not expected. The combat is a little on the basic side, which becomes more obvious later on, but the platforming is solid and quite enjoyable.

And it’s surprisingly great to play on the Steam Deck. I would consider it surprising since the visuals still look fantastic while holding a stable framerate, and I would say the team did a great job with optimization. I just wish they didn’t lock the quality settings on the Steam Deck by default.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.