Now that summer is winding down, one thing is clear: 2026 has been a killer year for shooters. Pragmata’s hack-and-shoot twist offered an inventive spin on the formula, Marathon is a killer extraction shooter once you get the taste for it, Mouse: P.I. for Hire teed up delightful cartoon visuals, and Saros delivers a fast-paced bullet hell spectacle on par with 2021’s excellent Returnal. Now you can add another great game to that growing list: Luna Abyss.
Developed by Kwalee Labs and out now for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X (also available via Game Pass), Luna Abyss is a first-person shooter that mashes Returnal, Doom, and Metroid Prime together into one heart-pumping action game. Its snappy shooting and clever platforming elevate a refreshingly compact indie into one of the year’s most exciting shooters. Though it’s not as extravagant as Saros or as innovative as Pragmata, Luna Abyss gives its bigger genre peers a run for their money.
You play as a prisoner trapped in an ominous megastructure on a moon. To help cut down your decades-long sentence, the jail’s robotic warden tasks you with retrieving some lost tech buried beneath the prison’s seemingly endless mess of tubes and deteriorating steel. It’s an easy enough task, except for the fact that the prison is crawling with monsters. Though the story is too heavy on mumbo-jumbo lore, it’s cryptic enough to pull you deeper into a grim six-hour adventure full of blinding red lights that give Luna Abyss a stellar atmosphere.
Those eerie environments create the perfect arenas for Luna Abyss’ Doom-like shootouts. Early on, I only had a scout rifle that dinged dreg-like freaks with sharp shots. Later, I got your typical shotgun and long-range rifle, though both are capable of breaking different colored shields. Though the shooting is a little on the shallow side, every weapon packs a punch and there’s a great flow to juggling your arsenal to bust shields and follow up for maximum damage. That basic premise deepens with each new power, adding in explosive finishers and bubble shields that give just enough to play with every time it feels like you’ve hit the bottom of what Luna Abyss has to offer.
The twist here is that you don’t actually have to aim at monsters to hit them; there’s a lock-on system pulled straight out of Metroid Prime. That means that you can focus more on your movement during a fight as you strafe around enemies and pepper them with shots, minding not to temporarily overheat your weapon in the process. That idea is paired with the fact that, like Saros, enemies shoot out waves of colored orbs that you need to dance around to survive. Boss fights can get especially tense once you’re circling around an evil sphere that floods the screen with lasers and orbs. Lock-on keeps it manageable, but you still need to know how to skate around with grace.
That idea extends to Luna Abyss’ platforming, another area where it takes some clear inspiration from the Metroid Prime series. At first, it’s just a matter of hopping around some metal platforms. Within the first two hours, though, it gradually introduces new tricks at a steady pace. Soon you’ll learn how to air dash through pink gates and possess machines that you can fling off. Every new power you gain naturally builds on the rest of your arsenal, getting you to that sweet flow state where you’re chaining double jumps into air dashes into machine possessions. It’s as fast and fluid as Ghostrunner — which set the standard for fast-paced first-person platforming back in 2020 — but with Metroid Prime’s approachable design sensibilities.
There’s a lot to like here, but my favorite thing about Luna Abyss is that it’s always hyper-confident in itself. It’s not ashamed of being a feel-good-and-look-cool shooter where you blast aliens. And why should it be? That experience is core to the genre’s DNA. Blasting aliens apart in satisfying ways is a foundational piece of gaming that goes back as far as Space Invaders. A shooter like this is the video game version of a still-life painting; it’s a classical bit of game design that all innovations spring from. Luna Abyss embraces that by throwing you into a big, dumb tone piece where the monsters explode like piñatas. There’s some heady sci-fi if you want something deeper to chew on, and the twisted megastructure levels create a sublime maze that’s built to be marveled at, but nothing beats the primitive joy of blasting a little monster and feeling the feedback of your oversized weapon in your hand. That’s formalist art in motion.
