Moon (DS) Review

Hot off the release of last year's impressive DS adventure, Dementium: The Ward, Renegade Kid is back with a new first person game titled Moon. Published by Mastiff, the game casts you as Edward Scott Kane, the Chief Operational Officer of the Extra Terrestrial Encounter Organization sent to the moon to investigate strange goings on. After a mysterious alien force slaughters his peers, he embarks upon a journey full of puzzle solving and robot blasting.

Like Dementium, Moon features a phenomenal 3-D engine that runs at a blistering 60 frames per second. Outside, you'll marvel at the lunar landscape, the Earth in the distance and hundreds of stars. Inside, you'll wander through tight corridors with pulsing lights, explore gigantic hallways bursting with color and unload countless rounds on robots of all shapes and sizes with nary of a hint of slow down.

That said, although Moon is a FPS, there's a much bigger emphasis on its story and puzzle solving. You'll spend much of your time wandering around searching for switches to activate and items to find. In addition, you'll be able to access a Remote Access Droid (RAD) to go places Kane cannot fit. This pint-size robot can access ducts and slip through tiny cracks to disable force fields while temporarily incapacitating bad guys with a stun gun; after the force fields go down, you can run in there with Kane guns blazing. It's just a shame that the run and gun action takes a backseat to what at times seems like aimless wandering. Some gamers will dig poking through rooms and figuring things out. We, on the other hand, kept dozing off.

Fortunately, the developers mixed shooting with the puzzle solving to keep you awake. Kane's default weapon, the Super Assault Rifle, sounds wimpy, but certainly packs enough stopping power to take down most enemies. If that doesn't suit you, the Muon Pistol, Oxid Cannon and Fermion Sniper rifle do an excellent job making things dead; you even get to drive a vehicle called the LOLA-RR10.

We're also happy to report that the game controls wonderfully. Fans of Metroid Prime: Hunters and Dementium will immediately fall in love with the default control scheme that has you firing with the L trigger, moving with the d-pad and aiming with the stylus/touch screen. You won't have a problem lining up your targets.

Despite the slick looking visuals and well-designed controls, Moon has average music and sound effects, some of which repeat. Things became so annoying that we eventually killed the audio for a little while. We also wish there was more enemy variety; we're tired of shooting the same droids. Furthermore, where's the multiplayer mode? At this point, every DS first person shooter needs Wi-Fi multiplayer.

We have mixed feelings with Moon. It's a superb visual achievement with spectacular controls and fun shooting, but we grew tired of the old school "hit this switch to activate this door" gameplay. So long as you go into it expecting a slow-paced first person adventure instead of Doom, you'll enjoy this lunar vacation.

[IGN reports that early copies of Moon suffer from a bug that forces you to restart. Thus far,we have yet to run into this issue.]