Now that summer time is winding down, one factor is obvious: 2026 has been a killer 12 months for shooters. Pragmata’s hack-and-shoot twist supplied an creative spin on the components, Marathon is a killer extraction shooter when you get the style for it, Mouse: P.I. for Hire teed up pleasant cartoon visuals, and Saros delivers a fast-paced bullet hell spectacle on par with 2021’s glorious Returnal. Now you’ll be able to add one other nice recreation to that rising checklist: Luna Abyss.
Developed by Kwalee Labs and out now for PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, and Xbox Sequence X (additionally accessible by way of Sport Cross), Luna Abyss is a first-person shooter that mashes Returnal, Doom, and Metroid Prime collectively into one heart-pumping motion recreation. Its snappy capturing and intelligent platforming elevate a refreshingly compact indie into one of many 12 months’s most fun shooters. Although it is not as extravagant as Saros or as progressive as Pragmata, Luna Abyss provides its greater style friends a run for his or her cash.
You play as a prisoner trapped in an ominous megastructure on a moon. To assist reduce down your decades-long sentence, the jail’s robotic warden duties you with retrieving some misplaced tech buried beneath the jail’s seemingly infinite mess of tubes and deteriorating metal. It’s a straightforward sufficient job, aside from the truth that the jail is crawling with monsters. Although the story is just too heavy on mumbo-jumbo lore, it’s cryptic sufficient to drag you deeper right into a grim six-hour journey filled with blinding crimson lights that give Luna Abyss a stellar ambiance.
These eerie environments create the right arenas for Luna Abyss’ Doom-like shootouts. Early on, I solely had a scout rifle that dinged dreg-like freaks with sharp pictures. Later, I received your typical shotgun and long-range rifle, although each are able to breaking totally different coloured shields. Although the capturing is just a little on the shallow aspect, each weapon packs a punch and there’s an excellent movement to juggling your arsenal to bust shields and observe up for optimum injury. That fundamental premise deepens with every new energy, including in explosive finishers and bubble shields that give simply sufficient to play with each time it feels such as you’ve hit the underside of what Luna Abyss has to supply.
The twist right here is that you simply don’t truly must intention at monsters to hit them; there’s a lock-on system pulled straight out of Metroid Prime. Which means that you would be able to focus extra in your motion throughout a struggle as you strafe round enemies and pepper them with pictures, minding to not briefly overheat your weapon within the course of. That concept is paired with the truth that, like Saros, enemies shoot out waves of coloured orbs that you want to dance round to outlive. Boss fights can get particularly tense when you’re circling round an evil sphere that floods the display with lasers and orbs. Lock-on retains it manageable, however you continue to have to know the way to skate round with grace.
That concept extends to Luna Abyss’ platforming, one other space the place it takes some clear inspiration from the Metroid Prime collection. At first, it’s only a matter of hopping round some metallic platforms. Throughout the first two hours, although, it steadily introduces new methods at a gentle tempo. Quickly you’ll learn to air sprint by way of pink gates and possess machines that you would be able to fling off. Each new energy you acquire naturally builds on the remainder of your arsenal, getting you to that candy movement state the place you’re chaining double jumps into air dashes into machine possessions. It’s as quick and fluid as Ghostrunner — which set the usual for fast-paced first-person platforming again in 2020 — however with Metroid Prime’s approachable design sensibilities.
There’s quite a bit to love right here, however my favourite factor about Luna Abyss is that it’s all the time hyper-confident in itself. It’s not ashamed of being a feel-good-and-look-cool shooter the place you blast aliens. And why ought to it’s? That have is core to the style’s DNA. Blasting aliens aside in satisfying methods is a foundational piece of gaming that goes again so far as House Invaders. A shooter like that is the online game model of a still-life portray; it’s a classical little bit of recreation design that each one improvements spring from. Luna Abyss embraces that by throwing you into a giant, dumb tone piece the place the monsters explode like piñatas. There’s some heady sci-fi if you’d like one thing deeper to chew on, and the twisted megastructure ranges create a chic maze that’s constructed to be marveled at, however nothing beats the primitive pleasure of blasting just a little monster and feeling the suggestions of your outsized weapon in your hand. That’s formalist artwork in movement.