Game Experience: Medium
Game Value: Medium
Quiche’s Recommendation: Give it a go!
In The Path to Luma, your mission is to clean. You bounce from planet to planet, reviving each polluted and dying world into a renewable green one. It’s a refreshing premise considering many games these days are about destroying and killing.
Of course, back here on Earth, fighting pollution is not necessarily fighting pollution. It’s fighting those people who create pollution, which often includes entire governments. It often results in destroying livelihoods and entire towns in some cases. But hey, you’re creating a healthy world…for those who can afford to live in it.
Harness the power of the wind and sun.
In Phosphor Games’s The Path to Luma, you’re not fighting anyone. In this F2P for iOS, each planet is a puzzle. You help our hero, Sam, solve each world’s riddle to bring it back to life. There are solar sticks to move around to power doors and generators to create clean energy. Batteries have to be charged which powers levers that literally twist entire planets into green ones. Windmills need to be lined up with wind. And so on.
Concept is spectacular. Graphics and animation are superb, down to the battery rolling off our stick-figure hero’s back and his scarf. I love the scarf. I want a scarf.
Cool scarf, Sam!
Actually, there’s not a lot to dislike about The Path to Luma.
But why isn’t it fun?
I’ve cleaned up six worlds, and I’m done. I’m onto another F2P.
First of all, moving levers and turning planets isn’t that easy to do. On some planets, you have to keep your solar stick under sunlight while turning a lever on a different continent. It’s not too tricky, but it’s not the simple Angry Bird action. Several areas require very nimble fingers to keep that there while moving this here without rotating the entire planet. Okay for the first few planets, but then tedious.
Moving things around is fun…for the first few worlds.
Also, each planet offers a new challenge, and it doesn’t require heavy brain power, but it does require some. You have to study the planet, see where everything is, and perhaps some trial and error before solving it. Again, fun to do sometimes, but then, once again, we enter into tedious-ville – a lot of it because you can’t see everything at once. To compare with Angry Bird again, you can’t see everything from a “birds-eye” perspective and so you’re often wondering which lever is which instead of trying to solve the puzzle. It might even be a better game if it was 2D.
The game is fascinating and just about everything is well though-out. It just wasn’t too fun for me after a few rounds. But again, there’s nothing wrong with a game about fighting pollution.