Moonbase 332 Review – Crawling Under the Bar

Moonbase 332 isn't something you've probably heard of. Good. It's made by an indie company from Germany called PatchNoteStudio, the developers of another title called Der Professor, a game that looks like Moonbase 332 due to both games being made with FPS Creator.  Moonbase 332 is available from Desura for $5. The story of the game is, uh, a story. Let's just quote the developers:

You play an old American exterminator. After a War between Germany and Austria in Year 2007, a base on the Moon was found. Austria has tested there some genetically modified Plagues to use it as a weapon. Your job is now there to clean up. Fight your way through the Moonbase 332.

Yeah. That aside, let's look at the game. It's made in FPS Creator using what I can only assume are prefabs taken from the community or a store of some kind, as the idea of talent going anywhere near this game is surprising in itself. Yes, that includes talented game reviewers. There's 25 levels split up into 5 chapters, cutscenes, secrets, and some other stuff. It's so jam packed with content that 99.99% of players will never see it all. To be fair, they've all quit after ten minutes. It is only through intense willpower and the promise of pizza that TechRaptor is able to bring you knowledge of what occurs after that ten minutes. Hold onto your butts, readers, we're going into uncharted territory.

Let's start by looking at the options menu, if you can call it that. What you see is what you get. Graphics are either Low, Medium, or High, and it doesn't actually appear to do anything. Not only is there no audio settings, but it tells you to do it yourself from Windows. There's some account stuff with points, earned apparently by playing the game, but this reviewer was too taken aback by the options to see if any of it actually worked. The only upside is that it lets you play without creating an account. Don't let it be said that we're not looking for the positives.

Once you get into the game, you're given a blue flashlight the size of a bowling ball and can pick up a Glock. Once you do, you're greeted with your character's (?) voice, also known as Microsoft Sam. This is the same voice that's used in the main cutscene. Here, listen to it yourself and imagine it going off every couple of minutes in-game. Moonbase Voice Over

So after defeating a skeleton with a machine gun and questioning why you're playing a game with a skeleton with a machine gun in it, you come to a large stone room with windows (made of wood, apparently) and some stairs. At the top is a large naked man with spikes sticking out of him that you need to kill. He's a bullet sponge, but the A.I is so bad that you can get him stuck on a corner and stand around for the next two minutes and unload on him. After that, some giant floating skeleton heads with purple eyes come out. While they're probably supposed to attack, they're made to sit there and die by the bad A.I.

Once you do that, exit the room and fight some crossbow-wielding elves. No, that's not a typo or anything, go fight some elves. Complete with fantasy armor and crossbows, it's exactly what every player expects from their sci-fi FPS. There's also probably some zombies around here, for some reason, but the person writing this has been dumbfounded into autopilot and can't really remember. Exit a door and finish the level.

The first secret (probably not) is a pair of glocks located somewhere in a labyrinth of vents at the beginning of the next level. After getting those, you can go to a, uh, hotel, and fight some zombies. The zombies now have butcher's cleavers in each hand and, apparently as equivalent exchange, have given up basic A.I that they had in previous levels. There are also some sort of Iron Man/Crysis ripoffs with guns of some kind, but due to the way that some corpses stick around forever and some disappear the moment their health reaches 0, screenshots could not be gathered.

During all of this, mind you, there is the sound of a generator in the background. As you move through the level you come to realize that it isn't a static background noise, but the noise of an actual object far off in the level. The closer you get, the louder it becomes. By the time you're nearing its location (which you have to go to), the hum has increased to a deafening roar akin to mountains being thrown across your eardrums. It's at this point that any sane person, any living being, anyone not dead and cold in the ground, would turn off the game and go do literally anything else. The bad graphics, the bad controls, the bad design, the bad enemies, the bad noise, the bad everything, all collides at this movement in a roaring cacophony of horror that seeks to not only torture your mind, but your body as well.

Whether or not Moonbase 332 is secretly Germany's newest military torture project or the result of some arcane blood magic, the conclusion is the same. Do not buy this game. Your $5 is better spent on pet rocks than this. Your $5 could go toward buying Deluxe Air off of a con artist and still be a safer purchase than this.  There is no upside, there is no redeeming quality, there is nothing good about any of it. All the assets are taken from elsewhere, the graphics are terrible, the music is horrible, the sounds are deafening, the A.I is useless, the enemies don't fit in with the genre, the locations are out of place, nothing works right, nothing looks right, and to top it all off it's not the result of some child messing around, it's an actual studio's second game. They looked at the first, learned nothing, and went back into the bathroom to produce Moonbase 332.

Go spend your money on candy and milkshakes. Stay far away from this game. Run, and do not look back.

This product was obtained for free by the developers for review purposes.