Moon Mystery is a space-faring, car-driving, submarine piloting, starcraft flying shooter that has no right to be both as good and as bad as it is. You are Sam, with your helpful companion Toby, you will travel the stars to uncover the mystery of the moon! What that mystery is, I’m still not really clear on after seeing the story through. I had a surprisingly fun time with it, though, despite some serious flaws.
Sam I Am
The game begins with a terrrrrrrible nightmare. Your protagonist, Sam, is stuck on a desert planet fighting robots. He can slide, double jump, and slow down time while blasting away with some of the strongest aim assist I can remember in a recent release.
As you awaken, you’re back on the Moon, orbiting around the Earth. Sam’s co-worker has gone missing after muttering about crazed visions. Lo and behold, alien robots are invading, and Sam is tasked with slaughtering them on the moon and across space and time itself.
To do this, he’ll take robot guts and use them as currency at robot machines, which is weird to think about. There, you can craft an assortment of weapons, including some of the worst shotguns in video game history.
There is even a basic leveling system, earning you skill points to unlock things like the double jump you had in your nightmare. There is a lot to this game, and almost none of it works well on its own. Somehow it all coalesces into something greater than the sum of its parts, even if that means it’s a 5 out of 10, instead of a 2.
Shooty McShootface
Moon Mystery is a first-person shooter. On Xbox, it controls well, though even at max settings, your horizontal movement is far too slow. It takes seconds to do a full circle, and jumping over to PC on this Play Anywhere title, it immediately felt almost great on the mouse and keyboard.
I stuck with Xbox for my full playthrough, half of which is up on our website as a livestream if you’re interested in seeing it in action. Sam can run, slide, double jump, slow time, and more as you earn skill points. You’ll start with a weak pistol and slowly build up a large arsenal which includes: SMGs (great), Shotguns (all terrible), Assault Rifles (very good), Sniper Rifle (fantastic), and Heavy machines (terrible).
Shotguns have no range and hit like tissue paper up close. I stuck with the basic SMG, outfitting it with full attachments and tearing through everything the game could throw at me. When you’re not shooting your platforming, which feels pretty bad. A lot of the floating platforms refuse to give you any time to react to them.
There are also some low/no gravity sections where you must shoot to move around, and with the slow turn speed on a controller, they were a nightmare to try to navigate. What was not an issue was the game’s surprising assortment of vehicles.
You’ll get a space buggy, space ship, submarine, and more (well, one more) to drive, fly, or submersible around in during the game’s roughly 5 hours of campaign. They all control well, with the only issue being how the camera doesn’t move behind anything on its own in third person. You’ll have to both drive and move the camera if you aren’t interested in the first-person camera.
You can up the FOV, which starts out at 90, and the game ran well for me the entire time. It’s a far cry from what I saw of the PC release roughly 10 months ago, where the game was kinda ugly and ran poorly on many people’s rigs. That isn’t an issue on Xbox Series X, where everything felt like a locked 60 and looked surprisingly clean.
The audio does not fare as well. While the music is excellent, it never loops correctly. Instead of fading in and out, it just stops mid-track and restarts. The voice acting and writing are most likely not English native, as a lot of syntax errors and odd pronunciations help add some levity to what is, in general, a basic overall plot.
There is a good variety of locations, with some ambitious attempts at adding scope and scale to the environment. You see the lack of budget in how empty most of the environments are, though. If there weren’t robots to shoot, they’d have nothing but text logs to fill them.
Wrapping Things Up
Moon Mystery shoots for the stars and nearly achieves its goals. For $20, you get 5 or 6 hours of occasional fun, and a few moments of utter bewilderment. It is an ambitious, flawed, mediocre game that I kind of love.
Moon Mystery
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Ambition
- Locale Variety
- Great Music
CONS
- That doesn’t loop properly
- Stiff controls on console
- Odd voiceover and writing
- A baffling ending
