Nukezilla Review: Moonbase Alpha (PC)

When I first saw Moonbase Alpha I was intrigued. I’ve always been interested in space and astronauts. The main thoroughfare of Enid, Oklahoma, the small town I grew up near, is named after astronaut and local hero Owen K. Garriott. I thought it would be cool to go into space, but once I heard you have to join either the Navy or Air Force my ambitions dwindled a bit. Maybe I can take after Garriott’s son (and videogame industry legend) Richard “Lord British” Garriott and buy a ride up there some day. Until then I guess this game will have to do.

Moonbase Alpha is a simulation game produced by NASA and developed by Virtual Heroes of America’s Army fame for the PC. Players take over the role of an astronaut stationed on the moon in the near future. On the way back from a routine excursion in a lunar rover, the titular base’s solar array and life support systems are damaged by a meteor strike. You and your fellow astronauts have to work restore power and life support before everyone inside the base, you know, dies.

Players have to coordinate the repairs (or if parts are too damaged, replacements) with their fellow space-faring grease monkeys because necessary resources like tools and remote controlled robots are limited. Once a repair is started a timer starts, and a series of Operation style mini game puzzles pop up periodically. Complete them and speed up the repair. Fail, and the rest of your team asks what’s taking so long. The time limit is forgiving enough that I never failed the mission, but the goal of the game is really to see how fast you can do it. Good teamwork on the mission is the only way to make it toward the top of the leaderboard.

And that’s it, one mission. There is a listing for which map you are playing on while looking through the server list, implying that they could add more in the future, but now the only difference is how many people are on your team. The number of repairs changes in relation to the size of your team, but the objective stays the same.

Generally the game is stable, but I had trouble getting into servers sometimes. I would be able to connect, but once in the game I was stuck in some kind of spectator mode and had to completely quit out of the game to get out of it. The only other problems I noticed were some minor clipping issues. Your astronaut has a tendency to walk through the solar panels depending on which side of them you start the repair job on. It’s also possible to get the robots stuck in a few places, but I’m not sure that isn’t on purpose.

The last issue is one of preference. The game is currently only available via Steam, so the few PC gamers out there still holding a grudge against Valve’s service will have to either bite the bullet and install Steam or hope for a broader release.

The game isn’t perfect, but I encourage everyone to go download it now. There aren’t really any other astronaut simulators out there, let alone free ones with NASA’s endorsement. Moonbase Alpha is a fun game, so since we have a pretty international crowd here I’d like to say on behalf of the American taxpayers: you’re welcome.

(What does this score mean?)