Buy Luna Shattered Hearts Episode 1

Against better judgement ("maybe it doesn't feel as floaty and amateurish as it looks in the videos") I bought it aaaand what can I say: not getting that money back.

A total mess. Super floaty movement (movement speed and walking animations don't align) , moon gravity allows for insane jumps that feel like the character gets violently pulled up rather than... well... jumping. Combat is ABYSSMAL with the slowest animation I have ever seen, you can actually count the indiviual frames while not feeling ANY impact or power. And that is basically everything you realize within the first SECONDS of the game. I tried moving around a bit, but nothing really makes sense and I have no idea where to go since every place spawns beasties that stunlock me forever and brutally murder me in the process - I ended up getting destroyed by some alien-like somethings that sprung from a demonic tree or some such. So, overall balance might be an issue too. Not going to find out, though as I am done with this.

Game had its chance and blew it (with a nuke) - not going back to this trainwreck. Now excuse me, I need to wash my hands after this. Ewww!

Generic platformer with bad gameplay and weird art style.

• Nothing comes to mind

• Movement isn't responsive and combat doesn't have any impact
  
• Quests are huge grindfests like collect 30 of something that is dropped by a specific enemy ~10% of the time

Your game is bad and you should feel bad.

It makes me sad to write this because I had high hopes for this game. The greenlight page made it sound so promising but it just isn't any fun.

Pros
+Nice art

Cons
-Poor Voice acting
-Unresponsive, redundant controls that can not be remapped if you are using a gmepad
-Floaty physics
-Sloppy animation
-Game does not explain any systems to you other than how to jump. What are the two meters above your health meter? No idea
-Your partner does very little other than get in your way
-Enemies take entirely too many hits despite you needing to basically let them run into you before they are in attack range.


Then there are just some head scratchers. Using an Xbox 360 gamepad the left trigger is used to switch from fullscreen to a window yet it does not switch it back. What does you ask? The right trigger, which is used as an inventory button.

From the time I played it I gather that the game is trying to be a point and click adventure game with platformer elements but everything is so vague. After traveling to the girl's house you are given several quests that flash above your head but there is no way to look at them again.

As it is the game is just not worth your time. Maybe with a few fixes it could be playable but for the time being it is not worth the $5.

Combat and platforming are both severely underdeveloped. Jump height is always the same whether you tap or hold the button. You only have two melee attacks and enemies barely react to taking damage. Animations have few frames and look awful. Moving between areas takes the game out of windowed mode. The red bean item either straight up doesn't work or has some unexplained caveat.

Currently Luna: Shattered Hearts does not feel remotely finished, and I'm not sure if it's even feasible at this point to patch it to an adequate state. I can only hope that the game's systems get fleshed out better in time for Episode 2, but after this botched first chapter, it may already be too late.

It's sad to see a game, that could actually be fun, turning into a total crap lame game!

The controls are absolutely horrible. The game need serious programming and tweaks!

This is so terrible, and i wasn't expecting much, but at least something decent!

Don't Buy this game!

Just a big NO. Why?
Starting from the very beggining, this game is very annoying. Fighting with someone not on even floor will make fights very hard - you will miss enemy while getting hurt or enemy will just ignore you and move forward. The late option just happened to me when I was fighting my SECOND turtle (first enemy).
While trying to see what I can change option all I managed to found was window mode. Too bad it's not working, because every time you move to another area (shop or house for example) game automatically changes to full screen.
But even if everything would be fixed, it's still at most decent game, with very decent art. There is nothing that would make this game worth to remember or look forward for another episode.

Straight up? This game is hot garbage.

As a side-scrolling action game (I don't use the term Metroidvania because this isn't one) Luna: Shattered Hearts fails to deliver the kind of fidelity and tightness in terms of controls you'd come to expect from the genre. The movement is very floaty, but the bad kind of floaty. I would describe Dust: An Elysians Tale's movement as floaty, but because you have so many movement options and aerial control it ends up working out. In this game you only have one attack and you pretty much stop when you touch anything in mid-air and lose all momentum. It's not fun.

Even if the controls were better the combat and other gameplay mechanics are pretty lame too. As I mentioned earlier, you only have one attack and it takes about half a second for it to actually get out once you hit the button. This would be fine if you didn't get knocked out of the animation once you get hit. It ends up with you having to just mash the attack button until the thing you're fighting dies. Which you'll probably be doing a ton of since the only "quest" in the game requires you to grind out a ton of items from enemies, which is extremely fun!

This game has a couple of "complex systems" in it but strangely enough the game doesn't actually tell you about them. There's a guide the creator has up for the game that you can check out that is extremely helpful and will probably answer every question you have about the game. The problem is it's not actually in the game. How is anyone supposed to enjoy the game to the fullest when they don't understand what any of the systems do?

All in all, this game feels more like a proof of concept than an actual finished product. If you want to play a good side-scrolling action game/Metroidvania check out; Dust: An Elysian Tale, Guacamelee, Hell Yeah! or Valdis Story: Abyssal City.

Ugh, I really wanted to like this, and I tried, I mean, REALLY tried to enjoy it. I was looking forward to its release after seeing it on Greenlight. I liked the look and the unique visual design, and it seemed like it had a lot of potential to be fun.

But it wasn't...

A lot of the problems seem to stem from the way it doesn't relay important information on how to progress to the player. It seems to be left to chance to try and figure out what needs to be done in order to get what you need to progress. I'm not saying things should be spelled out to the player; allowing them to discover things for themselves IS a good thing to do, but at the very least, you have to help them along in some way, like providing some kind of clue as to how they can obtain the resources they need. Other things to take into consideration is just the tediousness of combat. Maybe what you can do is make the beetle enemies significantly weaker, but provide more of them so its easier to make use of their carcass in order to actually get needed ingredients to drop from enemies, as its really hard to get some of the hive enemies in place.

Another thing that needs to be addressed are the loose physics. It feels like the chracter slides around too much from the momentum. Platforming needs to have precise control, otherwise the player will be constantly falling from ledges. Also, more control in jump height would be beneficial, like shorter taps of the button for smaller jumps.

I'm not sure if this was a bug, but there was a frustrating instance during the major boss fight (with Chumbo?) where I would take constant damage for no discernable reason when I was at ground level. At times I would get forced out of the room from the constant knockback after just entering it. It's also too easy to exit that particular boss room by accident mid-fight. Having the entrance/exit on an elevated platform would easily solve that issue.

As it stands, this still feels like its too early for release, and could really use more play testing. There's a possibility of a good game in here somewhere, but it needs a lot of work before it reaches that point.

bad controls, combat is not fun, the game LAGS/STUTTERS

feels like a beta build

I was so excited with this game judging it by it's screenshots and art pictures that I've even bought some extra copies here and there. And I was so dissapointed when I've actually tried to play it. Don't get me wrong: the visuals are pretty impressive and stylish. But the mechanics and gameplay are so bad, soooo baaaad. Remastering the core mechanics would probably improve this game, maybe. At it's current state Luna is a mess. Cheers!

The combat is very laggy, single move, and unintuitive. The art is so good and I really wanted to like this game, its art reminded me of valdis story. But this games combat is terrible and upon death it restarted my game. Also there is no quit game button so you have to alt tab and kill the game. I got this game in a bundle and hadn't recieve my key. Emailed the dev and he sent me one straight away. Credit due to timely dev emails, but saddens me that the combat is so boring. This is an episode apparently. Mr developer, please play valdis story and try to make a similar combat style and it will help the game greatly.

controls awkward and seems out to just kill you off for no reason from the outset so you won't realise how short it is. Not to mention episodic which in this sort of game just turns me off entirely, should really just be one entire game for an entire price. Still say to avoid, or at least make your own mind up and watch some gameplay video's

Note my gameplay is inflated idling for cards, so don't judge that as gamelength.

Why do I get the feeling that this game had some interesting ideas and nice potential, but it is all ruined with with buggy, unpolished gameplay and visuals, and other annoying stuff...

This game is a adventure-platformer hybrid built around an artistic vision on how the game should look- and it does have a certain look and feel not seen much.

Dont know if the story is good. First 30 minutes there is a lot of talk and glimpses into background lore - all told in a very rambling way but i have hopes things will clear up.

So if you are looking for a tightly polished platformer game then keep looking and skip this. Adventure game fans will not like this one either. First level is a mess and quite hard. Nothing is explained and a dogged determination is required to advance. Only played 30+ minutes and advancement is quite slow yet the UI is not as bad as i feared from the greenlight discussions. 360 controller works great as long as you dont touch the LT/RT buttons which for some reason is windowed/full screen button.

Game does have a certain appeal. nothing is explained and so you have to learn things the hard way.

edit: completed the game. It was good but the before mentioned caveats are still there.Storywise episode I does not give any kind of conclusions. It is a pretty decent game that gets better as you learn the ropes. I will be looking forward to Episode II.

edit2: dev released a guide to the game. It is pretty much essential to take a look at it