Nerd Mentality

REVIEW: Moon (DS)

Posted February 23rd 2009 by Adrian DeHerrera.

June 4, 2058. You are astronaut Edward Kane, Chief Operational Officer of the Extra Terrestrial Encounter Organization. Just recently a team discovered some type of hatch on the moon's surface and it's up you to find out what's going on. You'd think an organization specializing in this area would be exciting, but most cases lead nowhere. And now they want Kane to investigate possible alien activity on our own moon? Well, you'd be surprised at what's happening up there.

Renegade Kid brings us Moon as their second title after Dementium: The Ward, which was released in 2007. Anyone who has previously played Dementium should expect more of the same controls, atmosphere and some recycled graphics. While these two are both first-person shooters at heart, Moon relies on sci-fi elements instead of the creepy survival horror seen in Dementium.

The game starts off with the main character Kane accompanied by two of his colleagues; the leader of the mission, General Lambert, and Kane's partner, General Tsukigami. Seeing the team in their spacesuits is really Kane's only physical interaction with other people. After a short series of events, he gets thrown into a mission to go inside the moon alone and discover the secrets beneath the surface. Some people may like the mystery of not knowing what lies at the end of the tunnel until it is reached, but I think this is lazy storytelling. The only plot advancement comes in the form of radio communications and short diaries scattered throughout the facilities, much like the original Resident Evil. That's about all we get story-wise until the ending.

Like several shooters on the DS, the game uses the control pad for basic movement, stylus to look around and the L or R button (depending on your handedness) to fire weapons. On the receiving end of your weapon fire are small aliens or robots that shoot balls of energy or bullets in various patterns. Throughout the game you'll see a dozen or so main enemies in different settings in the labyrinthine maze. The latter half of the game especially challenges players to plan out what order to defeat enemies in a certain room and what weapon is suited for the situation.

The weapon selection is a really fun aspect of this game. Each of the seven weapons have unique features and are so well-balanced that even bosses later in the game can be taken down with the standard rifle. The second weapon you find is the Muon Pistol, which is better for taking down small enemies with one shot. There are also the equivalent Moon versions of an automatic rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle and two types of rocket launchers. Switching between weapons is as easy as dragging the stylus to the bottom of the touchscreen which pauses the game and brings up the weapon choices.

Another item that I wouldn't classify as a weapon is Kane's Remote Access Droid (RAD). This device works much like the clockwork kazooie eggs in Banjo-Tooie, among other examples. In certain areas of a level there's almost always a red forcefield inaccessible to Kane. This is when you send out the RAD to one of the nearby small tunnels to navigate to another room where you look for a series of switches that deactivate the barrier. The problem is that the RAD only has the ability to stun enemies and can't last long around heavy fire. So after the shield is down, it's always important for Kane to jump in quickly, killing the enemies and saving his robotic friend by picking him back up. This is a nice break from some of the monotony of shooting and makes some use of puzzle solving skills.

The other piece of equipment used for a small part of the game is the LOLA-RR10, which is basically a lunar vehicle with a turret used in a few missions on the moon's surface. The concept of driving around shooting robots sounds fun, but in this case it's not. First of all, the controls are horrible. The vehicle moves in a flat plane with the D-pad, which does not match well with the awkward inverted aim controls of the turret on top. The vehicle itself has such slow reaction time that it's difficult even to turn a corner, let alone shoot enemies or avoid bombs when completing a timed mission. Everything about this feels tacked on as another gameplay mechanic and something that should have been thrown out.

This game does achieve greatness from a technical standpoint with its graphics. Using the Renegade 2.0 Engine, this game has some of the best graphics and particle effects on the system. It also runs at a smooth 60 frames per second. However, at times there is some troubling slowdown that comes up when many enemies are present on the screen. This seems to happen mainly when firing the super assault rifle in a room with certain enemies, where it's down to one-third the normal speed, to the point that it feels as though the game might freeze completely. Another problem is the lack of style, which seems to have only improved slightly from the developer's previous effort. The wall textures aren't bad when going through the first few stages, but throughout the rest of the game it's just the same old walls and stage designs used over and over again.

The use of sound is also a mix of good and bad. The short moments of voice acting near the beginning sound excellent, and it's not too often we get that on the DS. Weapons and enemies all have unique sound effects or spoken phrases. The aqueous Lepton Spread neutron shotgun and the muffled ionic projectiles from the Quanta Rifle are particularly fun to listen to. Background music is what you would expect to find during a creepy scene from a sci-fi movie and it's clear they were trying to capture an eerie atmosphere. While some of the melodies have a pleasant beat, there is almost always a scratchy industrial sound that hampers what could have been a decent soundtrack. In some cases players might want to turn down the volume because it's just unpleasant to the ears.

The game will last players ten or more hours in the single player game. As for other extras, there really isn't a lot here. Adding a multiplayer mode would have been fun, for any first-person shooter, but this is single player only. There's also no online mode. However, players can replay past stages and collect hidden artifacts to unlock training missions. These training missions are in a Matrix-like environment that focuses on pure shooting and some puzzle solving with the RAD. It's not much different from the main game, but it at least tries to give us some added content.

Closing Comments

Moon is a decent game and we have to give credit to the small team at Renegade Kid for creating what they did. However, it still carries over the same problems seen in Dementium. It's too repetitive, lacks feeling with the plot and characters and just doesn't have that attention to detail seen in some games by larger developers. Fans of this genre should like the shooting elements though, as it's on a comparable level to the multiplayer in Metroid Prime: Hunters. And if you can get past the repetition of playing the similar levels, or play in short intervals, it's a fun game while it lasts.

Tags: Moon, DS

Posted in: Reviews, Gaming

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