Amazon Luna review: Not quite on cloud nine yet

digitaltrends.com:

Amazon Luna officially launched at the perfect time for me. A few months after moving to a new city for this job, I decided to visit my family in a rural part of Virginia. I’d be without my PS5 and Xbox Series X, but a cloud gaming service would ensure that I wouldn’t be stuck on last-gen consoles and my Switch for console gaming.

Considering that I hadn’t checked the platform out since its early days in late 2020, I was excited to see what Amazon Luna now delivered. The technology’s prowess was noticeable on mobile and Amazon Fire TV versions of the service, but a stutter-heavy PC service and a lackluster library meant it didn’t make a lasting impression on this vacation.

Cloud gaming is a somewhat controversial segment of the video game market. The idea of playing console-quality games straight from one’s phone or a web browser is very enticing, especially as hardware and games get more expensive and powerful internet speeds and 5G become more widely available. Instead of competing with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo in the console market, cloud gaming is the avenue that big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have decided to pursue with their gaming platforms. Unfortunately, results have been mixed, with Google Stadia being a particularly notable failure as it didn’t follow through on its lofty promises and lacked a great gaming library at launch.

Now, Amazon is up to bat with Luna as the new premier game streaming service. The service quietly entered early access in 2020, but it just got its full release this month. And while it feels more complete and stable than Stadia might have at launch, it repeated some of the same problems throughout my trip.

Across mobile, PC, and Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Luna