There are quite a few modern first-person shooters taking notes from the bullet hell arcade games from yesteryear. Games like BPM or Deadzone Rogue throw walls of projectiles and fodder enemies at you, and demand you thread yourself through them like a gun-toting needle to return fire without getting obliterated. Luna Abyss joins these ranks but certainly stirs the formula up a bit. When we took a look at the first level of gloomy sci-fi shooter a couple of years ago, we saw just enough to get intrigued by the potential quivering in the crimson glow between all of its shadows. Now that we’ve gotten our hands on a bit more, being introduced to a new weapon, movement mechanics, and a killer boss fight, I can safely say that the optimism was justified.
Warm-Up Round
I was dropped right back into Sorrow’s Canyon, a prison colony with the most accurate name in the universe. The grimy metal halls, scaffoldings, and makeshift walkways made out of piping mixed with occasional stone floors and weird organic growths all give a sort of Chronicles of Riddick, grim dark gothic energy. Giger-esque, without all of the phallic stuff. It certainly doesn’t matter what anyone was actually doing in a place like this before our hero, Fawkes, wakes up in an open coffin, finds a nifty gun, and starts shooting them all, because most of the things that move around down here that aren’t you are mindless husks who want to destroy you.
The almost sardonically chummy tone in which the sudden guiding voice in Fawkes’ ear, Aylin, takes with her charge does help add a bit of texture to what comes off as a pretty standard “everything here sucks and is bad” aesthetic. Most people, likely including her, would rather not be trapped here, but she is dangerously close to sounding like she’s having something that resembles fun, and that does make me want to know what this world is hiding, at the very least. It sits in contrast with the only other non-enemy character you meet in the demo, The Waif, who gives guidance in solemn riddles like a depressed Tom Bombadil.
Gliding from room to room, strafing gracefully through enemy fire and returning with blasts of your own is a breezy process, thanks to the aim function that auto locks to the enemy closest to your crosshairs, letting you focus more on the moving than the aiming. I liked this at first, taking the mental load off of trying to line up shots while gliding from cover to cover helps you focus on defense. But as the encounters progressed, the challenge didn’t really follow suit. Skull-faced drones chased me around the room while floating eyeballs fired from floating perches, but things didn’t get anywhere near too hairy to deal with in the canyon.
The Water Begins to Simmer
I found a second weapon, a shotgun that specialized in shutting down gleaming blue shields, and some nuance and complexity started to reveal itself. Some enemies now were cloaked in these barriers, which had to be shattered by the shotgun before doing damage to them directly. Now I was sliding from cover to cover, switching back and forth between weapons to make certain enemies vulnerable while trying not to overstay my welcome in any one spot for too long. That auto lock feature began to make more sense, but still, I found getting to the end of the Canyon to be a pretty tame experience. I know this was the extent of the original demo, and I can see walking away from this feeling tepid about what the future could hold for this goth-person shooter.
Then I played the new additional mission from further into the game and yeah, Luna Abyss might be cooking with gas.
Full Boil
The Scourge Crater is a snowy, craggy mountain face with floating platforms and a heaping helping of sunlight and sky. There are a lot of floating bits of rock and far away platforms that put Fawkes’ new double jump and air dash to great use. Theres no real indication to what has happened to Fawkes between the Canyon and now to give them these powers, likw the ability to execute low health enemies to regain health, but I don’t necessarily require exposition every time theres an opportunity to do something badass.
It doesn’t take long to find a new weapon, a long ranged rifle that does big damage, but overheats in just a handful of shots (unlike your standard gun or shotgun that you can squeak many more rounds out of before havin g to cool it down). New enemies come with it, like some floating bundles of death that explode when touched, or a larger, scarier eyeball creature with its one big single-shot laser. This new weapon comes with a new color of shield to dispatch, too.
When we get off to the races, moving from little island to little island, staying fast on the trigger for the new enemies that pop up at a brisk pace, and staying on top of what the necessary weapon to take them down with was the faster-paced slobberknocker I was looking for. It’s not quite Doom-levels of expressive combat – every enemy there has a best weapon to kill them with but not necessarily a “correct” weapon, leaving room to flex however you see fit. But the limited offensive options are balanced with the sometimes overwhelming need for defensive finesse. At its best, every plan has a window of time where it will be most effective before you have to regroup and try something else, like dipping behind a pillar of rock to wait out a big beam, knowing that a handful of bomb drones are well on their way to clear you out of cover with a bang.
Traveling through this stage between combat introduced some environmental movement tricks as well, like boost gates that launch you when you dash through them, or weird flovating balloons that you can possess, jumping inside them to get a view from their perspective before erupting out of them to continue the climb. There’s a cool, if not a little garish, moment a little over midway through the wintry crater where you can actually possess a Goliath, some sort of giant minigun wielding monstrosity that can mow down a small battalion of enemies with ease. Though this level kept things pretty simple, I like the potential of Luna Abyss using possession in conjunction with air dashing and double jumps for some good platforming puzzles – or even in combat scenarios.
Eye of the Beholder
The rowdiest and most difficult combat in the entire demo was against the level-ending boss, a big eyeball monster in the style of a Dungeons and Dragons Beholder by way of Dark City. It stayed in the center, relentlessly firing walls of bullets (and occasionally lasers) making it tough to find the space to take advantage of how exposed it was. Phases where it is invulnerable and you need to deal with how to fix that change the pace up well, at first its juvst breaking the connection between power points in the walls that are blasting it with an impenetrable shield, but eventually it’s surviving waves of enemies and long stanzas of incoming fire, etc. At its busiest, it almost felt a bit like Housemarque’s excellent Returnal, but in a smaller arena. I can only hope Luna Abyss’s combat can crescendo like this for all of its boss fights.
With some patience for its soft-touch opening minutes, I found myself very on board with the Luna Abyss’s brand of crowded screen shoot-em up. It’s thick with moody vibes, which can be more than just a good backdrop for the action. And don’t let that auto targeting aim get you complacent, because when the more blustery bad guys turn up the heat, you won’t have aiming as an excuse as to why surviving the onslaught takes you multiple respawns. If the gunplay and platforming can evolve further, as it did between these two demo levels, then I can’t wait to stare into the Abyss when it opens wide sometime this year.
