"A Fairly Generic And Monotonous Space-Themed Platformer"
"Moon Raider" takes a lot of retro elements from older platformers and attempts to blend them together with a neat looking visual aesthetic. Unfortunately, the game suffers from incredible monotony and painful level design that left me, a huge platformer fan, unimpressed.
The best thing going for this game is its visuals. There is a cute pixel-theme going on here with a nice variety of color, with many blinking lights and effects occurring on the screen. At times, it is nice to look at. However, there seems to be a stark difference in the FPS for the player sprite compared with the background visuals, which made my eyes strain a bit when playing the game. I'm unsure as to if the game itself runs at different FPS for separate locations (unlikely), or if there is something going on with the visual settings mixed with the parallax scrolling of the background environments, but it was very distracting for most of my time with the game. Unfortunate since this was the game's strongest piece.
The music is okay, but fails to vary form stage to stage very well. It doesn't really form its own identity, and just seems like another space-themed song that could be found in any other platformer game such as this. Nothing was very memorable nor fun enough to stick to my ears. it wasn't awful, but it surely won't raise anyone's eyebrows with intrigue.
The gameplay and level design are decidedly where the game takes a nosedive in quality. The gameplay is very similar to the original Mega-Man , except there is not a variety of powers that you can use to your advantage. All you get is a very bland and crummy blaster that is unrewarding to use. There are some health and energy powerups to collect, but they don't make any of the combat sections exciting. The game's movement is also pretty floaty and unprecise, and there aren't many interesting platforming challenges that shake up level design or provide any thematic highlights. The levels are incredibly similar, save for a few sections of lava or lasers, but enemies and bosses failed to make a lasting impact on me. Most enemies follow boring movement/attack patterns that are easy to manipulate, yet the game counters this by putting instant-death traps around the levels in increasing frequency. After a while, the game just got stale and I grew tired of even playing it after less than an hour.
Also, there really isn't any semblance of a real story here, contrary to other reviews. It boils down to - "oh no your mom is dying, go to the moon and kill aliens and get some collectibles to save her please!" It's very tacked-on and honestly didn't need to be there at all, since as far as I know the game didn't add anything noteworthy during my gameplay time. I assume there's some ending cutscene that adds a bit more, but that really isn't a story at the end of the day. If anything, its a very poor one at that.
In conclusion, I think this game needs a lot of work in order to justify its $15 price point. There is very limited gameplay and story to experience here, and there's nothing that really differentiates this one from the rest of the platformers pouring onto Steam right now. I would Not Recommend picking this title up unless there are some huge updates/reworks put into the gameplay/story.
Final Verdict: 2/10 (Bad)
"Moon Raider" takes a lot of retro elements from older platformers and attempts to blend them together with a neat looking visual aesthetic. Unfortunately, the game suffers from incredible monotony and painful level design that left me, a huge platformer fan, unimpressed.
The best thing going for this game is its visuals. There is a cute pixel-theme going on here with a nice variety of color, with many blinking lights and effects occurring on the screen. At times, it is nice to look at. However, there seems to be a stark difference in the FPS for the player sprite compared with the background visuals, which made my eyes strain a bit when playing the game. I'm unsure as to if the game itself runs at different FPS for separate locations (unlikely), or if there is something going on with the visual settings mixed with the parallax scrolling of the background environments, but it was very distracting for most of my time with the game. Unfortunate since this was the game's strongest piece.
The music is okay, but fails to vary form stage to stage very well. It doesn't really form its own identity, and just seems like another space-themed song that could be found in any other platformer game such as this. Nothing was very memorable nor fun enough to stick to my ears. it wasn't awful, but it surely won't raise anyone's eyebrows with intrigue.
The gameplay and level design are decidedly where the game takes a nosedive in quality. The gameplay is very similar to the original Mega-Man , except there is not a variety of powers that you can use to your advantage. All you get is a very bland and crummy blaster that is unrewarding to use. There are some health and energy powerups to collect, but they don't make any of the combat sections exciting. The game's movement is also pretty floaty and unprecise, and there aren't many interesting platforming challenges that shake up level design or provide any thematic highlights. The levels are incredibly similar, save for a few sections of lava or lasers, but enemies and bosses failed to make a lasting impact on me. Most enemies follow boring movement/attack patterns that are easy to manipulate, yet the game counters this by putting instant-death traps around the levels in increasing frequency. After a while, the game just got stale and I grew tired of even playing it after less than an hour.
Also, there really isn't any semblance of a real story here, contrary to other reviews. It boils down to - "oh no your mom is dying, go to the moon and kill aliens and get some collectibles to save her please!" It's very tacked-on and honestly didn't need to be there at all, since as far as I know the game didn't add anything noteworthy during my gameplay time. I assume there's some ending cutscene that adds a bit more, but that really isn't a story at the end of the day. If anything, its a very poor one at that.
In conclusion, I think this game needs a lot of work in order to justify its $15 price point. There is very limited gameplay and story to experience here, and there's nothing that really differentiates this one from the rest of the platformers pouring onto Steam right now. I would Not Recommend picking this title up unless there are some huge updates/reworks put into the gameplay/story.
Final Verdict: 2/10 (Bad)