Aluna: Sentinel of the Shards – PC Review

Genre: Indie Action-Adventure RPG
Developer: Digiart Interactive, N-Fusion Interactive
Publisher: Digiart Interactive
Release Date: May 26th, 2021
Edited by AlexKnight2005

In Aluna: Sentinel of the Shards, you go on an adventure through 16th-century Spain. Developed by and published by Diglart Interactive and based on the Comic Series The World of Aluna. With tons of loot and enemies to crush, you will find a fun loop similar to other loot-driven RPGs. The basic story of the game is you play as Aluna. Your mother, the goddess gives you a shard, and you have to go around the world fighting enemies and collect all the shards to save the world. Throughout the adventure, you go through various environments. These environments all feel very stale. There is no motion and little going on other than the enemies that you end up fighting. The story is fully voiced, with varying performances of quality. Cutscenes look like panels torn right out of the comics as well. So there’s plenty of art that pops off the screen with awesome 2d animation. These cutscenes happen for just about all major events in the story and some smaller cutscenes and events. It shows the art style of the comics and is consistent with the rest of the series. If you’re a fan of the comic series, then there’s a wealth of enjoyment to be had here. Seeing a comic-style animated brings to life some of the characters from the series. It brings the world to life even with the lacking environment designs mentioned below.

Before starting the game, there are multiple difficulty settings to choose from, ranges from easy, normal, and hard difficulties. Difficulty affects the combat and the rarity of lute you encounter in the world. In terms of gameplay, the weapons are unique. Whether you are shooting enemies with a bow or bashing their heads in with a torch at the beginning combat is always fluid with responsive controls. You have the freedom to map various abilities to the face buttons of the controller and fully customize your playstyle. Each weapon can drastically change the playstyle of the game. Swords have a different feel to spears, for example, and give you different ways to take out enemies. With this variation, it can add some variety to combat. Enemies in the game are generally similar and fodder to get through to get to each boss fight. Sometimes you get that warrior’s game feel where you’re just fighting wave after wave of enemies. There is little respite or side objectives to occupy the time. Just fight enemies constantly throughout the levels. It also would have been nice to find hidden areas with special items or other things to buff the Aluna. Boss fights are unique, and I enjoyed the different fights. Each has various mechanics and different patterns to memorize to beat them. Even during some of these, you might have the same waves of normal enemies as mentioned above to fight. There are villages between levels. They are mainly used to further the story or to restock items you might need during combat. It would have been nice to expand the villages and offer side quests and missions to add more variety to the game. Despite the flaws, you can find an enjoyable loot action game here. There’s inspiration from multiple genres of other titles, but it blends them well, if not a little too much in some regards.

In the settings, there were various options to customize the game’s visuals and to tailor it to your experience. I didn’t experience any fps drops or compatibility issues while playing the game. There was also full keyboard and mouse and controller support, with button remapping. I also ran the game on a friend’s lower-end GTX 970 pc, and it was the same experience. Though on that system, we did get a few crashes updating the drivers for his graphics card ironed that out, and the game was rock solid once again. So no matter whether you are playing on current hardware or older CPUs/ GPUs, you are good to go to have a good time.

Despite the flaws, there is a great action RPG underneath. Whether you’re fighting monsters or watching the story unfold, it’s an experience worth at least checking out. If you’re a fan of the comic series or like action RPGs with a high emphasis on combat, and loot then you will enjoy Aluna Sentinel of the Shards. The high-quality cutscenes alone will make any fan of the series, or comic art styles, in general, appreciate the art style. Some things could have been fleshed out more, but overall there is fun in Aluna. The game is available on Steam for $19.99.

PROS:

• Good combat
• Artistic cutscenes
• Fully voice acted
• Remappable controls
• Low system requirements

CONS:

• Too many waves of enemies
• Bland environment design
• Little to no side content

Blindpcguy Gives Aluna: Sentinel of the Shards an 8.0 out of 10.0 (80)