Beautiful, compelling yet frustrating Moon will give you a blast for your buck.
Graphics: 10
Sounds: 8
Value: 7
Tilt: 8
Since the Roswell incident back in 1947 brought the age old hypothesis of 'we are not alone' to new heights. With this reoccurrence brought newer ideologies, sightings, novels, movies, games and naturally the general populace paranoia of alien beings wiping out Planet Earth. Building upon this inspiration, Moon for the DS is about a discovered hatch on the moon in the year 2058 and you (playing as major Kane) is part of a task force aiming to discover what's beyond this hole. And as strange it may seem, Neil Armstrong's team somehow missed this or possibly the moon landing never occurred in 1969...ahh conspiracies, conspiracies.
Moon is essentially a FPS where you use the stylus to look, aim, switch weapons, display the map and so forth whilst the left/right buttons are for shooting; quite easy to get used to as the tutorial in the beginning gently eases the learning curve. Like all good DS games, the game caters both invert look and left/right handiness. As the game progresses there will be situations that your body is a little too big to get through thus using the (soon acquired) rover remotely gets you through these tight areas by disabling shields etc and even stuns enemies for a few seconds. Take note that if the rover 'dies' (explodes for the better word) then it's game over. And as an added bonus there will be opportunities to do some moon buggy riding; a nice touch to your standard aim to kill scenarios.
With all these added features, the game tends to feel like your typical old school shooter (a.k.a. Quake or Doom series) where pushing the right buttons enables you to progress further accompanied by a boss battle. Yet these boss battles is where the game starts tumbling as not only they are quite challenging, you'll need to do some guess work of how to destroy them (e.g. shooting glowing lights in a set order). The game doesn't attempt to explain how to kill them other than shoot first and if the enemy health bar decreases then you are in the right track. I was hoping more of trying to locate hidden manuals/terminals thus discovering about their weaknesses then just barge in and pray. Thankfully though, the game places decent checkpoints so getting nuked ten times in a row is not all that bad (for some).
Once finishing an episode enables you to replay the mission at any of the three difficulty levels and for the speed runners, records how fast and accurate you are. I guess this adds replay value however for me I don't want to complete the same mission with tougher monsters; maybe more monsters but not tougher. Yet a great feature is locating hidden alien artifacts (a.k.a. secret rooms). What this spells that if you manage to collect all three in the same episode unlocks training missions. These missions not only increases playability, but teaches you the tactics the enemies uses (past and future) and for obvious reasons not the bosses.
Visually Moon is the best looking game I have encountered thus far. The developers have done a terrific job making the entire adventure alien-like with (and oddly enough) glowing beams/terminals, eccentric machineries with plenty of flashing lights all rendered in a cool 60fps. Even the outdoor environments are astonishing to look at as you can see distant mountains, cracks and crevices and even the flares from the ever imposing sun states care was presented when making this game. Yet only a few times the game slowed down when there's plenty of action happening however never to the point of unplayable.
Accompanied by the superior graphics are the sounds as Moon is quite impressive to listen too. From the stomping of your boots throughout the pristine corridors to the whirling noises from the enemies to pulsating gun fire and even the voice acting are notable indeed. The background music are nice to listen to as well even though there's a techno beat, the scores are all alien-like, even haunting to some degree. Yet I wish there was a little more alien chit-chat to enhance the horror flavour of this game or human screams echoing through out the compound.
Moon has set the benchmark as far as FPS goes for the DS. Technically amazing from the graphics all the way to the responsive controls Moon certainly made DS FPS shooters a little easier to master. Added to the wonderful haunting music and quite a decent storyline, Moon will drag you in from the word go. Added extra features like remote controlling the droid to unlock passages and/or searching for hidden artifacts as well as driving the moon buggy gives a breath of fresh air to that run and shoot anything that moves concept. Yet if you can handle the ambiguous boss fights (and let me stress ambiguous with a capital 'A') Moon will give you a blast for your buck.