Here's our playtest of Amazon's cloud gaming service Luna

The gaming industry’s headlong dive into the cloud, led by heavyweights like Microsoft, could help end decades-long console wars and democratize the industry. Cloud gaming allows you to play with no console, for the price of a Netflix subscription—but the tech is still in its infancy, with a long road before it enters the mainstream.

For today and tomorrow—aka, Prime Day(s)—Amazon’s cloud gaming service Luna is available to all Prime members. It was previously only available by request or invite, and will go back to that starting June 23. Last week, I got myself a 7-day trial of the $5.99 a month service and gave it a spin.

• I tried out five games across four different devices, and logged about 8 hours of total gameplay.

TL;DR: I was pleasantly surprised with my playtest, which was mostly stable, smooth, and...just outright fun. Luna has some unique features, like instantaneous device transfer, that set it apart, but some major save issues and glitches demonstrate it isn’t ready for primetime yet.

Play it your way

Amazon says Luna requires at least a 10 mbps connection to stream 1080p.

Here’s what I’m workin’ with:

I didn’t use Amazon’s $70 dedicated Luna controller—I was all set with my trusty and well-worn PlayStation 4 controller. Luna is available on a host of devices; I tried it out on my MacBook Pro, PC, Fire TV, and iPad. My MacBook and PC were in the same room as my router, while the iPad and Fire TV were in rooms on the other end of my house.

• The games: Control, Metro Exodus, Ghostrunner, Super Mega Baseball 3, Killer Queen Black

Luna’s flexibility to play on so many devices is easily one of its best features, and play was generally stable on all of them.

• The worst experience: the iPad. Video quality and resolution were choppy, the frame rate dipped, and sometimes the audio was out of sync with the game.
• The best experience: The MacBook Pro, even though it’s where my game crashed (more on that later).

If you’re like me, who used to fight non-stop with my brother over our shared Playstation, you’ll welcome

Luna’s ability to have two profiles playing at once. While playing Control on my Mac, I was able to simultaneously boot up Metro Exodus on my PC.

Luna has a big-but-not-groundbreaking library, with some notable big-budget titles and indie sleeper hits. Its Ubisoft partnership, which brings over titles like Rainbow 6 Siege and Watch Dogs: Legion, is a great start. It'll need more partnerships like it has with Ubisoft if it wants to rival other cloud gaming enterprises, like Xbox’s xCloud.

My connection was pretty stable throughout my single-player playtime on Luna, with only the occasional network spike or audio lag. Load times to boot up games were lightning fast; I was never sitting around waiting to jump back in.

The situation was a little different in multiplayer. While queue times were quick and gameplay was mostly smooth, I was booted from a few games, leading to losses.

Here's a gif showing some of the lag I experienced:

Resolution on Luna was solid, but I felt it was missing the punch a console packs—especially compared to my PlayStation 5. Luna can only handle 1080p right now, but Amazon plans to make Luna 4K-compatible in the future.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

The absolute worst part about Luna was inconsistent save data management.

During a play session my controller disconnected from the game, and my character ran aimlessly in circles before I was forced to close the app. When I restarted the game, my save data was gone and I had to start from the beginning...losing an hour of gametime in the process. Oh, and this happened twice.

When save does work, it has some nifty features like instantaneous device transfer. I was able to move seamlessly between my Mac and Fire TV, picking up where I left off.

Bottom line: I was pleasantly surprised with my Luna experience. The platform was pretty smooth, has some decent games, and looked all right.

But I’m not sold on its potential to eclipse the heavyweights like Sony or Microsoft. It lacks the high fidelity I’ve come to expect from video games, and the resolution and frame rate dips, while acceptable in a single player game, would be the literal (virtual) difference between life and death in a multiplayer game.

Luna is a great choice for the casual gamer, especially given its reasonable price point. But it has a ways to go before it can truly compete with Xbox, PlayStation, or Switch.