Indie Game Review: Lumi

Control of Lumi is pretty straightforward, but very ingenious.  The one power that Lumi has available to it is the power of magnetism.  Using your triggers, you can change Lumi’s polarity from red to blue.  This allows you to grapple on to like-colored balls of light to get through through the different obstacles laid out before you.  Likewise, using the opposite colored polarity allows you to repel away from these objects to allow you to fling yourself over longer distances, as well as repel the occasional enemy attack.

The main objective of the game is to capture fireflies and then release them to the illuminating trees to light up that zone.  Once you’ve illuminated that particular world, a portal will open up to take you to the next zone.

There are three boss levels in Lumi.  All I will tell you to avoid spoilers is that one is basically a reflex based battle.  The second is a puzzle.  And the third will require all of your skills to defeat.  The action in these levels is very fast-paced and you will die, a lot.  But fortunately for you, there is no limit to the number of lives in the game.  Which is probably a good thing because I can say I wound up killing my little Lumi a couple of hundred times throughout the game.

Graphically, this game is absolutely gorgeous.  The backdrops and levels look like they were hand painted, and the characters in the game look just as sharp.  My only real complaint was that there just simply wasn’t enough of it.  I would have loved to have seen more levels to play, but unfortunately with an Indie Game, the size constraints are pretty strict.

With Indie Games in Xbox Live Arcade, there are a lot of bad and mediocre games out there.  But games such as Lumi are the rare gem that stands out above all others.

Lumi is available on Xbox Live for 400MS Points.  In my opinion, it’s money well spent.  Also, Kydos has developed a few more games for XBLIG which I may be taking a deeper look at soon.

I give this game a 4.75/5.0