The game feels like a videogame equivalent of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day
The plot of Moon is as groan-inducingly insipid as it is needlessly wordy and contrived. It's the near future, and there is a lunar mining and research base, but if that in itself wasn't a great premise for at least twenty-or-so pant-soilingly terrifying scenarios I can think of right off the bat, usually involving crap simply going wrong and astronauts getting closely acquainted with my personal best friends - explosive decompression and absolute zero environment, the creators of the game decided that the most novel twist of events would be to populate the moon with aliens... No, not some cool mysterious, you know ALIEN aliens but straight-up saucer-flying humanoid douchebags who set up a meth lab of sorts below the lunar surface. Enter you as Major Kane, and hang on to your eyeballs as they are about to roll straight out of your freaking skull, who is an operative of a government agency dealing with paranormal... Yeah.. I know - shoot me now and call it a day. It's no secret - a lot of FPS games have unspeakably silly plots, but few of them flaunt theirs as hard as Moon does. It hammers it in via endless boring, flow-breaking expository text-only Metal Gear-style radio conversations and at terminals scattered throughout the game. Even if you were to somehow suspend your disbelief and pretend the plot wasn't insulting your intelligence, the characters Kane usually talks to are all boring and one-dimensional, making it physically impossible to take any of their dialog more serious than a Sham-Wow infomercial.
Moon continues Renegade Kid's proud tradition established in their previous game - Dimentium The Ward of creating about twenty minutes worth of compelling unique visual and gameplay content, then smearing that in an uneven layer over approximately ten hours of playtime. From the moment Kane enters alien cartel's evil lair 5 minutes into the game, and up until he defeats the Pablo Escobar alien at the end, the game feels like a videogame equivalent of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day, as you will go through an identical level after identical level of generic "techno" corridors connecting slightly wider corridors sparsely populated with floating sentry droids and an occasional alien meth-head. On rare occasion the tedium is only worsened by mandatory remote-controlled droid puzzle which can be described as sort of like Metroid Prime's morphball segments, if all they involved was rolling down a tunnel that is about fifteen times longer than necessary and flipping a switch or two, then rolling all the way back.
Also, at several points the game forces you to drive a vehicle over lunar surface, and while that's unfortunately not nearly as fun as it sounds, those vehicle sections provide a slight offset to the tedium, as well as contain the game's easily stumbled-upon fatal bug which will negate all your progress until that point.
The game's difficulty starts out about 10 points below the "too freaking easy" mark, and stays that way throughout the vast majority of the campaign. However, if you persevere, and manage to stay awake for long enough to reach the games final few levels, you will be treated to a dramatic difficulty spike that forces you to retreat back to a save point to restore your health after ispatching every band of marauding drones, which by this point, while haven't changed visually, have become annoyingly tough to take out. This brings me to another important game design failure on Moon - while you regularly acquire additional health containers, the enemies gain strength at approximately the same pace, so near the end of the game you would still only be able to withstand five or six enemy blasts, which at that point occasionally connect with your shiny astronaut ass the moment you step through a door, but will take ten times the number of medpacks to restore full health entirely defeating the whole point of upgradeable health. The difficulty spike is in fact so dramatic, that the engine can't keep up with it, and the game slows down to a crawl at the beginning of every new room, sometimes skimping out of drawing less vital objects on the screen, such as your weapon in order to accommodate all the alien scum.
Also, at about the time the game turns into a prolonged quick-time event of entering a room and then hoping not to die within seconds the game's composer finally said "screw it" and replaced the background music with the sound a human being hears when his teeth are being filed down. That's not to say the rest of the in-game music is much better - far from it! All of it is of surprisingly low fidelity even for Nintendo DS, and almost no single in-game music loop is longer than a few seconds long. Also, the music cuts out entirely every time you go through a doorway even if the music on the other side is the same as was playing in the room you were just in. Come to think of it - whenever you reach a door, and decide to go through the screen goes black for about a second, and then you appear in the next room - but I'm sure there is a technical explanation to why that hast to be, instead of, say just opening a door and passing through it like in every other FPS.
All in all - it's easy to make an impressive Nintendo DS game - throw in a decent 3D engine, a full motion video cutscene or two, a
little voice work, and BAM! - you have yourself a high-production-values DS product. Nintendo's little dual-screen handheld has only a few of such titles earning them endless acclaim despite the fact not one of them even approaches the quality or scope of an average console game from ten years ago... And then you realize - the system you are playing these games on is more powerful than Sega Saturn and has twice the memory of PlayStation - isn't it fair to demand a little quality from it?