'Moon' (DS)

Also available on: N/A
Developer: Renegade Kid
Publisher: Gamebridge
Genre: First-person shooter
Release date: July 3, 2009

Let's get this straight: this has nothing to do with the recently released film of the same name. Call it unfortunate timing, or a sneaky way to jump on its success, it's just a handy way of describing the setting. It's set on the Moon. It'll be interesting to see other games take this approach - I vote changing Harvest Moon to Farm, and renaming Cooking Mama as Kitchen. Regardless, its timing is more likely because of the 40th anniversary of the moon landings, and it seems in 2058, man will discover a suspicious surface hatch and sends off a team to explore it. And you are part of that team.

Moon is from the developer of horror title Dementium: The Ward, with the return of that same first-person engine. And it's just as impressive, running at a super-slick pace that never drops in speed, and handles the stylus-driven controls effortlessly. Instead of cluttering you with control options, the D-Pad moves, the shoulder button fires, and the stylus looks around. Simple yet incredibly effective. The gun moves independently for a quick moment, so you can actually aim across the screen without moving, making accurate shots easy to make. Its tech is impressive and is a pleasure to control, something which very few other first-person shooters can boast about.

Its progression is incredibly straightforward, driven by obvious puzzles that need switches to open, with rooms of enemies to defeat on the way. Gunfights are largely devoid of challenge or inspiration, partly due to the controls, where flying robots glide toward you and fire shots at a predictable pace, becoming an exercise of side-stepping until the threat is gone. The crux of the puzzle-solving is a remote-control droid that can go through air-ducts and activate switches, which is novel at first, but when progression relies on this idea alone, is one that becomes old fast.

The main problem with the game is that it just simply isn't very interesting. From the bland robot enemy designs, the flaccid brown, grey and black walls that drench the corridors and the repetitive and unchallenging level design, there's nothing exciting to see, shoot or solve. It also exercises a lot of back-travelling, by dropping in more enemies and re-navigating the same laborious door switches on your return to a fork in the path. In many ways it's a lot like fellow four-lettered shooter Doom, but fails to notice the way it excellently stuck enemies in clever locations, and had puzzles that simple colour-key progression that was always a challenge.

It does try some interesting things - you can drive a moon-buggy across the surface between missions, avoiding blinking mines and taking down more hovering robots, but like the remote-droid it's an extension of the already bland first-person action. Collectables in each mission unlock a bonus VR training stage, which ramps up the enemy count to provide a real challenge, which is a shame considering they all need to be unlocked as you go. It does do a great job of maintaining the pace of the story, drip-feeding you information through computer consoles and entertaining cutscenes, and also has some excellent sound-design, even if sounds are horribly compressed and are disgusting to hear through headphones.

A possible saving grace would have been multiplayer, which is sorely lacking despite having an excellent control scheme and series of weapons that offer a real kick. The campaign is solid to play through and uses the story well enough to drive it, and as a whole Moon is by no means a bad experience, just one severely lacking in ideas or variety. It's impressive to behold, but perhaps naming it after an empty, vacuous rock was an accurate description after all.


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