What is it?

A couple of years ago, a new developer called Renegade Kid surprised us with the shocking and genuinely scary Dementium: The Ward on Nintendo DS. This was a first person shooter with a great original 3D engine, featuring screaming heads flying down corridors, zombies squirting toxic green slime at you from gaping wounds in their chests, and one really surprising hook of an ending. Moon is the second game from this team, and this one takes place… well, on the Moon. This is a sci-fi first person shooter that inspires natural comparisons to Nintendo’s Metroid franchise, but it’s actually far more of a traditional first person shooter than Metroid, eschewing the retraversal (or backtracking, if you don’t like it) of that series in favor of a mission-based run and gun kind of formula. You’ll have to excuse the comparisons to Metroid in this review, because there’s not a whole lot else to compare this game to on the DS. Let’s get started.

What’s the story?

Captain Tsukigami is a terrible driver.

A survey of the Earth’s Moon turns up a hatch in the surface, and of course, off to the planet goes a crew of humans to have a look. Unsurprisingly, things take a turn for the worse, and no sooner has Major Ed Kane arrived on site than he’re the last one left to grab a weapon and leap into the fray. The game’s story is told through a number of brief cutscenes. The ones at either end of the game are well voice acted, and the story in between is largely expressed through pieces of text dialog taking place between yourself and others over radio. These are done almost exactly as they are in the Metal Gear series, as talking heads in boxes chat back and forth, expressing their shock at new developments and carefully plotting out each mission. Fortunately, there’s no awkward dialog about stepmothers and girlfriends. There are also short cutscenes introducing and bidding a pyrotechnic goodbye to the various bosses you’ll encounter.

You won't believe what's in these jars.

The story arc hits a lot of familiar territory, but there’s quite a bit there that’s unusual in the handling of the story. It’s hard to cover this without spoiling it completely, but when I thought I had figured out where the story was going, I started to suspect there was something even more going on. Enough is left open ended at the close of the game that the game could easily spawn at least one sequel, but the same was done with Dementium, so we could expect such a thing from all Renegade Kid’s games. Honestly, I’d do the same thing if I were making a game: if it’s a hit, you can leave them hoping for more.

How does it play?

The controls operate pretty much exactly as they did in Dementium: walk forward and back or side to side with the D-pad. Control your facing direction and aiming with the stylus on the touchscreen. Fire with L. No jumping. You’ll get a helpful warning buzz from the rumble pack when a shot lands nearby, and a strong rumble when you’re hit, in addition to visual and audio cues.

Strafe!

If you’ve played Dementium or Metroid Prime: Hunters, you’ll jump right in and love the controls because they feel very familiar. I didn’t have any trouble with the controls at all, but I did have some issues with triggers. Approaching a door or other trigger will light up a button on the touchscreen which you can press to open the door, and you’re even given an audible cue when the button lights. I rarely had some trouble where I had to step away from these and approach again if it failed to light. This was really only in special situations, such as boss battles where switches need to be pressed to proceed, when they would time out and toggle on their own.

The RAD view in action features scanlines.

One of the items you get early in the game is a RAD, or Remote Access Droid. This was my favorite part of the game. Part morph ball, part radio controlled car, the RAD is dropped on the ground in front of you and then driven around in first person view. The low viewing angle and the gray display, combined with the constant rumble in your hands while driving (assuming you have that accessory) make this a very immersive and cool experience. The RAD cannot harm enemies, but can briefly stun them, creating some tense situations. Much of your time driving the RAD takes place in small tunnels that are sometimes occupied by robotic spiders. If you fire a shot at one and miss, it comes at you fast, and that can be scary. Even worse is exiting a tunnel to find floating robotic sentries or ceiling mounted turrets that deal far more damage while you tear around in circles looking for a place to hide. Later in the game I found the RAD useful for scouting ahead and stunning enemies for me, because you can switch back from the RAD at any time and rush into the fray to kill the stunned enemies. Fortunately, as soon as you find your way back to Kane, all the RAD’s damage is repaired.

This guy is a pushover if you get close.

Beyond the RAD, there’s a gradually increasing arsenal of weapons, most of which consume rounds. As a rule, I don’t use weapons that run out of bullets when given a choice, and I went through most of the game without changing from the default weapon, which is a machine gun with infinite rounds. Every enemy takes damage from every weapon, and the freedom to use whatever weapon you like is nice. I did very well with this for a long time, because the design of the game is such that many of the enemies can be taken down easily simply by standing in just the right place and leaning on the trigger. This includes many of the bosses. Most glaringly is a kind of miniboss that’s a large ball with giant spiked wheels and cannons on either end. When you arrive in the room it fires on you, but when it gets close enough, it tries to ram you. Surprisingly, it doesn’t do any damage when it rams you head-on, so all you have to do is stand close and keep shooting, and you won’t take damage. I couldn’t tell if this was by design, but you face this miniboss three times and this same strategy worked every time. Another issue was that the RAD can shoot through forcefields when driven right up against them. I never found a situation where this helped me cheat, but it surprised me anyway. Similar issues where Kane can shoot enemies that are close to forcefields, but on the other side, came up from time to time.

This again? I'll hide behind the... uh-oh.

Speaking of boss recycling though, this game does it about as much as Metroid Prime: Hunters did. I’m going to chalk that one up to limited memory space on a DS game card, but I’ll give Moon credit for handling this in an original way. You’ll encounter a boss a few times, but each time your environment will be dramatically different. Maybe there will be no hiding places this time. Maybe you’ll have to run up and down flights of stairs to activate switches to open a forcefield that the enemy can shoot through, but you can’t. And maybe the game will force you to use your arsenal by making different phases of different bosses far more susceptible to certain weapons. Well played, Moon, well played.

One of the many maps you will download.

Finally, there’s the level design, which I thought was very good. The areas in the game vary in layout and all feel very different, though many look similar while running through them. The persistent map actually lets you navigate through rooms without looking at where you’re going in the first person view, as a tiny triangle turns on the map to show where you’re looking. This is great while passing through rooms that have been cleared of enemies and forcefields, which I did a lot of because I kept retreating to the save stations every time I took significant damage. Thankfully, the enemies don’t tend to respawn, though there were a couple of weird instances where I cleared a room and returned to find one enemy wandering around later. I particularly liked that you’re rarely forced to retread these rooms. The layout is done in such a way that you can pass through the area in a linear fashion and then exit at the far end in most instances, and the fact that the enemies are gone means the rare retraversal is not a problem at all.

How does it look and sound?

Driving the LOLA. The moon sure looks samey.

I have to acknowledge that 3D on the Nintendo DS does not often look good. Only a small handful of games have done full 3D very well. Metroid Prime Hunters is one of those games, and Moon and Dementium are two others, with better visual quality in Moon. Moon does an admirable job of hiding pop-in from view by making rooms pretty twisty, and I only once found myself in a room where I could see the end of the draw distance. There aren’t a lot of textures in the game, but I wouldn’t really expect more than what’s here in mechanical corridors and computer rooms. All the enemies are robots and everything’s very high tech, you don’t really expect cobblestones or 1980s era liquor store glass bricks.

The lunar surface sequences in the game are really neat. You drive around on the surface in a buggy, which has a great feel. There’s detail to getting in and out, as the doors slide open and closed and Kane steps out. You lose a few seconds watching this happen, but it’s a nice touch when just last generation on consoles we had to overlook people popping in and out of solid block vehicles instantaneously. While the surface of the moon is not very exciting to look at, the distances between the sections you’re exploring are nicely expressed. It feels like you’re covering great distances and that the installations you’re checking out are pretty vast. Just as when indoors, your destination is marked on the map at all times, letting you move forward at all times in the game so you never feel stuck.

Snipe!

The weapons are all distinct from each other despite the limited resolution, with varying shapes and sizes and most critically, colors. Rounds that are dropped from enemies are shaped and colored distinctly so you know what weapon they’re for, which makes a big difference in intense firefights. When your most powerful weapon is maxed out and there’s rounds everywhere, it’s a great feeling to unleash hell on the enemy and reload right away. I found the game pretty generous with these pickups in most instances. Weapon effects are exciting too, with lots of flash along with the rumble for the big blasts.

Sound is a mixed bag. The sound effects are great, with distinct sounds for the weapons and enemies that keep you aware of what’s going on. The music in the cutscenes is good, but unfortunately, the music is alternately annoying and intolerable during gameplay. It’s painfully obvious that all the great content in this game squeezed out the space needed for high fidelity music. Adding to the problem is that the music stops and then starts over whenever you exit a room and enter another room. I found this very frustrating near the end of the game when there was actually a song I liked, because the song would have just enough time to enter the melody portion that I liked before it was reset. Thinking back to Dementium, the music there was largely nonexistent in favor of ambient sound, which worked out very well. My advice is to go into the options menu and turn off the music, then turn up the sound effects, before playing the game. You’ll find it a much more pleasant experience.

How’s the replay value?

Pick your mission and try to do better.

Renegade Kid did a good job of packing this game card with content. The whole game took me almost exactly eight and a half hours to complete, not counting deaths. Keep in mind I retreated to save points a lot, but that didn’t take much time. Once you’re done, you can select from one of the three difficulty levels and play again, or you can run through any of the completed missions, or six unlockable “VR” missions, to beat your previous time and hit accuracy, as well as score more merits, which are gained by reading bits of the game’s story on computer terminals or collecting alien artifacts or other items. I didn’t grab 100% of these, but most were not well hidden in my experience. They were fun to collect, and that’s worth something for completists.

Is it worth it?

Moon, like Dementium before it, is a console FPS experience on a handheld system that defies that genre. Many of us believe that the DS is very well suited for FPS games because of its interface, but heavily handicapped by its other hardware limitations. Renegade Kid is one of the few developers who takes the time to wring every last ounce of capability out of the DS, and I give them full marks for the one thing this game has above most every other DS game I’ve played: ambition. It’s not a perfect game, suffering from clipping issues, some bad music, and some really easy bosses if you know just where to stand, but I really enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone who likes a good story and could appreciate shooting up some very big robots. And again, you have to try the RAD stuff, it’s very well designed.

Moon for Nintendo DS gets four and a half out of five Aeropausonauts. I’ll never look at our logo the same way again.