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.

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.

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.

The art style looks very nice and the premise seems solid but it has a ton of issues ranging from broken menus to terrible controls. Too many bugs and a generally clunky feeling ruin this RPG experience. It's a shame it seemed promising but perhaps with a bit more work it could have been awesome.

I would not recommend buying this game, especially for a purchase price of $4.99 for a 1st episode. I was looking through bundles and this game seemed interesting. I think in total I spent about $2.50 for the entire bundle. After playing the game for a little while I wouldn't have bought this game for $0.50.

The good:
- Graphics look cool.
- There is a chance for a decent story but the gameplay itself makes the possible story not worth going after.

The bad:
- I hate this 1st episode crap, put the whole friggin game together and sell it. Make the first "episode" the demo and sell the completed copy. Not hard, easy to do and people get to test out the game before they buy it.
- Nothing is really explained.
- There is a pink orb that follows you around and spits out health boosts when your health gets low but no idea what it is.
- You need to chip away at glowing blocks so you can continue to see otherwise it turns dark after a bit but nothing told me that or why I just started hacking away at things and figured it out. Keep in mind, you're underground and it appears as though your people are used to this, so why do you need to chip away at stuff to help you see when it makes more sense that you just can.
- Nothing tells you what a save point looks like or how to find it. It's not in any place that is obvious.
- The abilities of each character aren't explained so you don't know what anyone can do until the girl's AI kicks in (sometimes) and does something new.
- There is a button that spits out monsters but no idea why. It really feels like the people who made this game were thinking "Crap, we need to put more monsters in to help complete the oil ingredients quest but we don't know what to do. How about we just say F*** it and put in a button. That should work."

- The level you start out in has very difficult monsters considering there isn't a way to expand your HP. If you run into 1 tough monster could die very quickly. After I found the save point I wasn't as upset but running into one monster that spits out multiple other monsters that kill you really quickly is annoying and irritating. While trying to defeat the monster with the most HP, I die in a matter of seconds without much of a chance.

- The girl's AI is pretty bad. It's really random about when she'll revive you but better for fighting. I was fighting the large HP monster and for the first 5 times through trying to beat it I died and she just stood there. The next couple of times she tried bringing me back once or twice then stopped. (Here's another bad thing, I kept dying because there was no way for me to get away from the green goo the other monsters were spitting out. I was brought back and instantly died again.) After a few more times of me dying the girl's AI kicked in a bit more and actually kept bringing me back until I was able to get away from the monster.

- This game feels very lazy and lacks substance. It's easy to get bored while going after the second goal. Basically you need to find ingredients to make an oil to visit another person. You have no idea how to get them so you kill monsters, monsters wind up dropping some of the parts but you have no idea what monsters will drop what. After you kill the large HP monster, the monsters it spits out no longer are spit out and will reduce your chance of getting one of the needed ingredients.

That's my entire review of this game. I hope it helps people avoid this game and I hope it helps developers realize that you can't just slap stuff together and expect people to love it.

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!

This is an interesting little 2-D, side scrolling game. The gameplay is fairly simple, rolling, slashing, and jumping among other actions, fighting against an array of different monsters, collecting items, finding recipe's, crafting things.. It doesn't have a comprehensive list of items to craft the way a survival game would, but it is still fun. The story is interesting and was good enough to keep me playing for over 90 minutes when I planned on only 15 - 30. All in all not a bad game, could use some work here and there, but wouldn't be a complete waste if you were to happen across it. Not sure if I would pay much for it, but if it were in a bundle, I would recommend giving it a try.

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.

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