Amazon Luna has some ‘free’ games for Prime members

You don’t have to have a Luna account or pay above Prime for Luna in case you want to try out the service without any strings beyond standard Prime’s nigh-uncancellable labyrinth. No contracts, no cancel this, nope, just jump in and play.

I played with the Beta Luna back in pre-release days of 2020 pre-release invite only and was not impressed and cancelled on day 2 or 3.

16 months later, a faster newer computer, internet connection that gets 700mbit speed tests regularly, it appears they have gotten better, but it’s still got work to do. Controller/response lag made the racing games feel like I was playing on kid mode or something. The video is also … not going to say bad, but if you’re sitting close and playing on a 50″ TV you’re going to note the artifacting.

I’m not going to bash, but say if you’re a Prime member go ahead and try for yourself. There are 4 games up there for free this month. No commitments. No random recurring cost. Just jump in and play and leave if you don’t like it. The idea here is you’ll like it and join so you can play more.

I think Luna shines in the not-fast-twitch reflex games, but when you’re dealing with 28ms ping here, 7ms controller lag there, 13ms frame encoding, dropping a frame or two, it starts to add up to people are are used to not leading the controls. This applies to racing games mostly, and maybe it’s just I’m a terrible driver now, who knows. I do sooo much better on a console or playing on my computer locally than I do on the streaming platforms.

Also, I know Amazon doesn’t make the games that they’re playing, but it feels like some effort should have been put into making them more cloud friendly. From load times to random warnings to not turn off your computer while the hard drive indicator is flashing, these games show no indications they’ve been touched from a console version, nor do they show the massive improvements I’d expect to see when a cloud data center throws some CPU at a problem.

Or my experience is not the norm… you can check it out without any strings, other than Prime. Let me know if I’m off.

Pocketables does not accept targeted advertising, phony guest posts, paid reviews, etc. Help us keep this way with support on Patreon!