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 within; some of the artwork for the buildings is rather amateurish and there's minimal animation, but it's perfectly serviceable overall, and feels a lot like the early Maxis simulations. The user interface is less than stellar in many ways, however; you can't see what each individual building looks like -and thus where the power and thermal connector is on each building, which is quite important for the layout of your base- until after you've placed it (a problem that was fixed in rebranded 1993 update Lunar Command), and you can't rotate buildings either. Habitat and certain other modules must also be perfectly aligned in order to share a common power and heat connection, and 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 and will drive you nearly round the twist as your base gets larger.

There's actually a surprising amount of hard science to the nuts and bolts of the gameplay, though it must be said that this doesn't necessarily enhance the 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 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, but after you've got everything ticking over you're liable to lose interest quickly; the few disasters 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 let down by some annoying game dynamics issues and a poor balance between realism and entertainment, but still offers a few solid hours of entertainment and challenge. Not bad for a game that fits on a floppy disk three times over.

This game will run happily in VDMSound, but will be limited to speaker beeps for sound, at least in 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 the latter program. The game will also quite often lock up for no readily apparent reason, so save frequently.

Reviewed by: Jake Grey / Screenshots by: Jake Grey / Uploaded by: Jake Grey

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