Reviews - Luminesque

Very promising, but limited because of the following:
- Slow player movement
- Texture quality
- Hard to follow instructions (e.g. finding a person wearing a star is next to impossible)
- Very bare maps

Having said that, this game's got a good engine, a storyline, and that's a good start. I reckon the sequel will fix some of the above listed issues, and hopefully all of them.

In conclusion, definitely worth a shot.

Rather poor. When I joined the game it crashed, consistently showing error messages, one after the other. I will be uninstalling. The rating may seem harsh, but since I couldn't play the game, there's no way I could give it a good rating.

I really, really, enjoyed this game. The graphics are simple, but not poorly so. HeartBit and Benjamin Ficus manage to capture the emotions in the little character’s faces – combined with the arsenal of various weapons and sound effects, this game makes combat extremely fun. But the fact that I enjoyed it so much made the flaws all the more unbearable.

First of all, there is no AI OR online multiplayer. Most games have at least one or the other. This meant I had to find another player willing to sit cramped in front of the screen, sharing the same keyboard. The game was so much fun we were able to get past that. But here was the ultimate flaw: Our ability to dig, jump, and fire our guns was affected by the other person’s actions. Confused? Well, to put it this way, I couldn’t jump when my friend was digging to the right. And he couldn’t dig when I was digging downward. This made gameplay excruciating at times!

Furthermore, the menu is in need of some serious work. I understand it was designed for XBOX, but really, it doesn’t even support mouse integration. Similarly, you can’t toggle the music or sound effects, adjust screen resolution, customise your character, or create your own maps. This lack of detail just takes away the edge this game could have.

On the other hand, the gameplay itself was (minus the bug) wonderful. I recall some random reviewer online saying the repetitive digging sound got annoying. That was the least of my worries! When I played, I was so busy killing and getting killed I didn’t even notice.

So overall, I really enjoyed the game. But I can’t bring myself to play it again until the bug at least is fixed.

A bit disappointed. There was no way to choose what screen resolution I wanted to use – just a choice between 16:9 and 4:3. There is really bad ghosting when I play for some reason – two of everything, and it is very laggy. I’m able to play games like Crysis with at least 20 fps, so I know my computer isn’t the problem. The introduction was far too long, with text slowly appearing on the screen. I’ve only started the first level (because of the ghosting), but the importance of the nodes and hub have not been explained. The game cursor doesn’t match up to my Windows cursor. On the upside, the graphics look good and the soundtrack sounds promising.

Improvements:
An ‘options’ submenu is vital – most games let you change the screen resolution at least, and usually mouse settings, game specific options etc
Include a pause menu (for me, pausing just freezes the game)
Fix ghosting and cursor bugs
Double the speed of the text appearing in the intro (at least double)
Give users a reason for what they’re doing (i.e. what are we shooting?)

All in all, I think this game could be great with some more work.

Looks great! Very enjoyable, and it kind of screwed with my head. I would strongly recommend you port this to PSN/XBOX - first person games tend to work well on these platforms, and the number of people making online purchases is obviously increasing. I think I’ll write up a more substantial summary later on at my blog, once I’ve woken up. I will definitely be buying.