Recent reviews by [P90] ACEDOG11 『Lunar Church

I really don't want to discourage the dev team, but personally- i feel like some tough love may be needed, and I REALLY want y'all to succeed in this. I'll try to update this on every update if I can. (I did also fill out the play test questionnaire.)

Currently this game feels ambitious, and it certainly shows, you have your standard checkpoint sim (what drew me in), base building, resource management, and drone combat/ base defense thrown in.

Unfortunately- It does none of these well at the time of this review.

Lot of survivor variations- sometimes unclear (mainly at first) of what everything exactly looks like- i mean you have two eye conditions that are "eye yellow" and "eye slightly darker shade of yellow", and don't get me started on the stethoscope- Trying to peg someone for "infected breathing" by itself is hard. But that's the key- by itself - The most annoying thing this game will do to you is tell you to your face what is wrong with each survivor- Bitten? Even if it's well hidden the survivor's going to say "It was a dog, not a zombie I promise!", Sick? "It's just allergies!", just shut them up honestly, or have dialogue that won't directly tell the player what's wrong.

- This is a dumb thing to nitpick about I know- but for christ's sake the temp reader looks more like a gun than the actual gun, leading to one instance where I put down the demo for a second, came back, selected the correct tool to check temp, THOUGHT IT WAS THE GUN , switched through, could easily identify every other tool except for the gun- assumed that was the correct tool- shot the survivor in the face. If you don't want to switch out the models I get that- put a lil UI text box in the bottom corner or something.

...eh it exists, didn't really have any reason to fiddle with it in the very short demo.

- ..Why is this physics based? Sure- it could work well or be not noticeable if implemented well, but i've had the darn auto dump feature chuck boxes of food outside of the stockpile, resulting in me having to get off the cart anyways to fix the physics jank. Static models could have worked here.

Easily my least favorite part of the game, It feels extremely "tacked on", hell- when you succeed it jump cuts to a green "Success" screen- I've never seen the failure version of this- but i'd imagine it's almost the same but in red, and I accidentally alt tabbed during the first attack, Upgrades do little to nothing, such as the soldiers you can hire, and the convoy system is just... eh... at best, same issues. Feels like a v 0.001 within this demo. I'd recommend either a complete re-haul or give the player an option to skip it in some way- maybe you get extra $ for defending the base, and you don't get it for skipping it, I cannot stress how much i really didn't like these sections.


As the demo currently stands, this is a 4/10, i can see the potential- but oh boy is it not there yet. Give it a bit- i would rec. watching this development, hell, maybe this will be up there in my personal "best hidden gems" come September.

It's a little early in development- but it's a pretty fun simulator, Got 6 hours in it now and i'm fairly certain I know what's going on finally. But if you get "chucked in the deep end" like I did- the dev is working on an expanded tutorial, and he's pretty open to discussion on the discord server,

tl;dr- It aint much (right now) but it's honest work.

Support your local indie dev. This game's got very good potential.

I wanted to love this game, as it's something DIRECTLY in my little niche of favorite genres, mystery and procedural generation, but- I had to refund this on it's current state.

Flaws/concerns I noticed within 20 minutes-
-Not much of a tutorial
-Broke the game pretty quickly (opening up storage and walking away from it allowed for items to
remain floating in an "unreachable state")
-Hitting ESC IMMEDIATELY QUITS THE GAME- as someone with a habit of hitting ESC to get out of a menu, you can see my personal ire with this point (In town 2 when I tried this it told me to leave town to quit, not consistent w/ town 1. Glitch?)
[Quick edit!- I noticed a patchlog from 11 days ago about this exact topic. 100% another glitch.]


- You have to click to drag down on textboxes (as seen in town 2)
-Crashed the first (and honestly only) time I tried to generate a case.
-Sometimes sentences just don't make sense. For example in the FIRST town (which does not seem to be generated,) one of the statements is "Someone have aware long hair, and she's thriving in a friendly relationship." "Marlene, she has long sharp, flowing hair"

What does "aware long hair" and "long sharp flowing" hair mean?

I will be watching this game to see if it ends up in a state where I may repurchase and try it again, I know being a solo indie dev isn't the easiest. This game does have some decent potential behind it, I do hope this project continues being worked on.

• Insane replayability, true to the description, random tools across randomly picked levels
  
• Interesting tools, and very cool interactions between them.
  
• Very natural platforming
  
• Very intricate modding community!

• Possible to get softlocked (as warned in desc.)
  
• There doesn't seem to be too many level variants (fixed by mods)
  
• No tutorial on wtf the tools do- for example, "Bamboo" goes as far as it can before it hits something, then becomes physical, and in contrast- "Delete" spawns at the pointer and removes something. Mix that with "Terminate", which spawns at your pointer, makes everything in a radius movable, and moves it slightly to the origin of where you aimed. Cool, now try to remember as you only have 1 bullet of them and you're trying to remember which you have for the run, and what they exactly do- sometimes while falling into a pit.
  
• No tutorial on what you're exactly doing either- run around, collect fruits, go back to portal, BUT, if you force a fruit off the map, or delete it, it'll also count. Went a good while before discovering that.
  
• No way to change key binds. (Minor gripe.)
  
• VERY PRECISE platforming needed to solve levels given what you are given sometimes. (More a warning than a con.)

I like it, but don't see myself playing this forever. Maybe a cool party game (built in Pass and play!), [Fairly priced for the content. 7/10 imo, and i'm interested to see where development takes this!

's gud.

Seemingly abandoned by dev, never reached v. 1.10, where all of these fixes were promised.

All negative reviews from 2021 seem to still hold true.

if this is somehow too long- Game shows promise, but unlikely to achieve it unless the dev steps up and shows signs of life.


Edit- I've since refunded this game.

I want to love this game, but in this current state, I just can't.

You will frequently have enemies spawn inside closed off boxes, outside the map, or both

The AI is a bit too "snappy", if the AI sees you for more than 0.5 seconds, they're likely already firing at you, w/ above average accuracy.

There is no tutorial about how to move units, and the way that the "turn resolves" is a bit... weird,

The player makes all of their moves in one "turn", but for the rest of the grid it goes from bottom left to top right, wouldn't it make more sense for them all to follow the same rule? Either have the player do actions along that "line update" or set the AI to do their moves in turns aswell. The current system feels like a bunch of other systems duck-taped together atm

Game was, decent when I first bought it on sale- was planning on reviewing it for a video when times got slow with other game releases,

Tuned in and got a notification that the dev pulled this stunt.
It's honestly very disapointing.

Whoever is reading this review- I cannot say for sure if the game is good or bad, personally it was a 4/10,- but if the dev looks for fights like this, well, it's not a promising outlook for the future of this dev.

Game is COMPLETLY not finished- not even in an Early Access state, the Game Manuel is filled w/ lorem ipsum, the ingame tutorial is extremely tiny- despite me setting my resolution correctly, and the framerate absolutely tanked itself on actual gameplay, despite me preemptively lowering all quality settings to low or off.

I requested a refund after the time played on record- you're reading that right, 0.1 hours.

I would honestly look into this dev a little more, because this game has been released since 2020 and honestly should not be in this current state.

Update- I was refunded after having my ticket in the queue for only 2 hours.
Thank you Steam.

Game was so addictive that the Australian government had to ban it!
10/10