Luna Abyss review

Imagine a development team sitting around a table, each person naming their favorite first-person shooter mechanic. The controller-clinching bullet-hell of Returnal. The satisfying lock-on targeting of Metroid Prime. The relentless momentum of DOOM‘s combat arenas. The slow-motion firefights of Control. One by one, those ideas get jotted down on a whiteboard, before someone at Kwalee Labs figures out how to make them work together.

That scenario is imagined, but probably not far off from the actual pre-production meeting. Luna Abyss could have easily buckled under the weight of its own influences and become a a forgettable mashup of better games (anyone recall Bodycount’s merger of destructible environments and cover mechanics?). Instead, Kwalee Labs pulled it off. In a genre as crowded and creatively stagnant as the first-person shooter, that’s a genuine achievement. Luna Abyss is easily a top contender for the best indie FPS of the year.

Welcome to the Belly of the Moon

The campaign puts you in the role of Fawkes, a prisoner sent to explore a derelict structure buried beneath a mysterious moon called Luna. Here’s the surprise: the game has no interest in rushing you into the gunplay. For the first 15 minutes or so, combat is withheld entirely. Instead, exposition is fed through dialogue with your artificial prison warden, a giant, unsettling robotic head named Aylin. The environments are bleak and oppressive in just the right way.

The best FPS games understand that a gun is only as interesting as the world you’re firing it in. Half-Life 2 kept Gordon Freeman silent while the world around him revealed Black Mesa’s secrets. Prey took its time, letting you wander its space station before violence erupted. Luna Abyss earns a place in this company of context-driven shooters. By the time you finally get a weapon, you’re already speculating on what Greymont was, what (or who) destroyed it, and what you might find when you reach the end. Undoubtedly, Abyss piques curiosity better than most of it’s contemporaries.

Headphones Should Be Mandatory

The expositional setup is matched by some superb sound design. From droning machinery, echoes bouncing through massive structures, a stirring choral piece driving the opening cinematic, Luna Abyss rewards headphone use. When combat begins, the sonic shift hits hard. Projectiles carry a palpable sense of threat, and Aylin’s voice cuts through still moments with a sense of menace.

But Luna Abyss’ virtues aren’t just aesthetic. Enemies fill rooms with slow-moving projectile clusters that demand constant movement and spatial awareness, a clear nod to Returnal‘s bullet-hell action Your weapons use a lock-on system that rewards positioning over pinpoint aim, recalling Metroid Prime‘s targeting (which can be disabled if you prefer to aim freely). Playing an FPS on a controller usually feels like a disadvantage, but Abyss levels that out. Rooms seal off and fill with threats, channeling that classic DOOM pressure, just as the music heats up. Standing still is a death sentence, as enemies move and try to flank you.

Four Guns, One Key Problem

But it’s here that the game also reveals its limitations. There are only four weapons: a scout rifle, a shieldbreaker, the monarch’s lance sniper rifle, and the atom splitter. Each serves a specific purpose; the shieldbreaker destroys blue barriers, the sniper rifle cracks purple ones. But cycling through guns to hit a particular-colored shield feels mechanical rather than fun. Worse, the main assault rifle, your most-used weapon, feels underpowered against bosses, dragging some fights out longer than they should run. A stronger primary would fix a lot.

Fortunately, the nine major boss fights are mostly high points. Some flood the room with rotating walls of energy. Others push you through cramped spaces where knowing where you are matters as much as how fast you can shoot. Kwalee Labs resists leaning on spectacle alone. Each boss introduces something new; some wrinkle in movement or positioning that forces you to adjust. Still, with only four weapons, the later encounters start to blur, and the campaign’s five-to-seven hour runtime reveals those limitations before the credits roll.

Atmosphere Provides It’s Own Form of Firepower

Visually, Luna Abyss rarely stops impressing across its duration. Greymont is the kind of ancient, mysterious place the genre rarely renders convincingly. Giant industrial hallways dissolve into darkness. Statues loom over empty chambers. Distant machinery raise questions about what was happening under the moon’s surface. Broken labs, abandoned cells, and looming religious imagery all hint at the causes of Greymont’s collapse without stopping the action to explain them.

Luna Abyss works because it understand something many modern shooters ignore: intense combat means little without atmosphere and a reason to care. There are plenty of FPS games with engaging gunplay. The memorable ones give you a world worth fighting through. The weapon balance and shield mechanics ebb away at the combat’s enjoyment, but never enough to ruin the experience.

From Borrowed Ideas Comes a Distinct Identity

In lesser hands, this could have been a hollow collection of borrowed ideas. Instead, Kwalee Labs has made a stylish FPS that embraces its influences openly while still feeling like its own thing. For a debut of this scale and ambition, that’s no small feat, and well worth your time if you’re a fan of the genre.

Luna Abyss was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.