LUNAR BATTLE Preview for iPhone

My experience with Lunar Battle started off pretty shaky, as it crashed on me early on and I had to re-download the game. I felt like if anything this would be fixable, however, as the game was still not released. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and in the end it was more fun than I expected.

Lunar Battle is a persistent world game for iOS and android devices produced by On5 and Atari. You create your own space colony, gather resources, and face against space pirates and other threats. The game starts off slowly and the tutorial phase is long, but it at least gives you all the resources you need to have a fun time.

Lunar Battle opens up with a tutorial on space battles, where your ship fights against enemy pirates. The game play is fast, dynamic, and highly disorienting. The ship you man is difficult to control and the space you get to navigate in is fairly large. That being said, I still enjoyed the chaos of the battles as they only take a short amount of time.

After the fight, you crash land on a empty moon and begin creating your colony. You create facilities such as residence area, mineral mines, space farms, and more. You also take control of utilities such as water dispensers and oxygen creators. Over time you gain more and more facilities, but the game holds your hand through the most of it. While it makes sure you get what you need, I found that it was very difficult to care about my resources when everything had to be built. I still don’t know how to get some resources, why I should get them, and what to build with them. That being said, seeing your colony grow is a real treat.

Only after building up your colony can you take to the sky again. The fights are still chaotic and fun, but it now seems strange to go to a new style of game play after spending so much time on farming resources. I hope that the developers can balance out the game play to make the experience more unified.

As a whole, Lunar Battle presents a interesting experience with lots to explore, but not a whole lot to aim for. You don’t quite know what goals on your list you should achieve first and the battle system seems a little too wonky to navigate with expertise. I give the game a 7 out of 10. Even when there is too much and too little direction, a ride through the vast possibilities of this game still leaves a lot of good things to look forward to.

Here is the Lunar Battle Trailer:

Lunar Battle is available on the App Store and Google Play.

Related: Atari’s Lunar Battle, a New City-Builder and Space Shooter Coming to Mobile