Download Moonbase

It's SimCity on the Moon! Well, sort of...

Graphically, Moonbase is pretty primitive by today's standards, but not bad given the limitations the developers were working under at the time. The artwork for the buildings is rather amateurish and there's minimal animation, but it's decent and feels a lot like the early Maxis simulations.

The user interface is less than optimal in many ways; there is no way to rotate buildings, and you can't see what each individual building looks like until after you've placed it (a problem that was fixed in the re-branded 1993 update Lunar Command), therefore it's impossible to see where the power and thermal connectors are, which is quite important for the base layout. The Habitat module and certain others must also be properly aligned in order to share a common power and heat connection. The need for a huge network of power cables and coolant pipes, that have to connect to one specific point on each industrial building, can become cumbersome as your base gets larger.

Surprisingly, there's actually an amount of hard science to the nuts and bolts of gameplay, although it must be said that this doesn't necessarily enhance the gameplay experience. For one thing, there are very few industries available; you can refine oxygen out of the lunar regolith and occasionally find water from ice deposits, mine for the insanely rare and valuable Helium-3 (the only useful element the Moon possesses in large quantities), and manufacture electronics and solar panels from the other materials found on the surface, but that's about it. You can build lab facilities and radio telescopes to increase your NASA grant and hotels to attract tourists, as well as a few miscellaneous utility and habitat facilities.

One major drawback is that after the initial creation is over you're liable to lose interest quickly. The few disasters that do happen are generally pretty easy to recover from, and more annoying than anything else.

Overall, Moonbase is a brave attempt at a serious managerial simulator that's brought down by some annoying gameplay issues and a poor balance between realism and entertainment. All that being said, this game still offers a few solid hours of entertainment and challenge.

This game will run happily in VDMSound, but will be limited to speaker beeps for sound in the default config.

You can apparently hear a few voice samples in DOSBox, so feel free to experiment if you've got the hardware to handle it.

The game also locks up for no apparent reason, so save frequently.