Lunacid starts at its strongest, its honestly a fascinating game. The first few areas are frenetic, you're weak, even fighting a snail is a brawl. But, once you level up a few times and find a ranged weapon the game falls off in that sort of tension. Enemy design is archaic in this game, a good 90% of enemies are exclusively melee so you can just kite them out with ranged weapons trivially(which if like me you started as a Royal, you can buy immediately upon spawning in).

By the end of the game, Lunacid has ceased even a modicum of that thoughtfulness early on and instead turns into a shockingly-accurate reproduction of Half-Life 1, I even used my old counter-strike surf map skills to cheese many areas up to and including the final boss by gliding up and down wonky geometry. I personally find half the fun of these sorts of games being in breaking them, so I loved it, but I'm sure someone who was more enthralled by the methodical play of the early parts would disagree. This is combined with the fact the game rarely throws actually interesting combat encounters at you--very rarely are there more than two enemies in a room at a time, and I can count the number of actual bosses on one hand, so you're not really challenged at all once you get a build going.

The exploration is the other half, and it excels there with so many little secrets, hidden areas, routes through the game, and whatnot that it genuinely feels rewarding to meticulously go through the dim winding dungeons, but the relative dearth of interesting experiences in those place is whats stopping it from greatness.