Publisher: NASA
Developer: NASA
Minimum requirements: Win XP SP3; 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor; 2GB of System RAM; NVIDIA 7000-series or ATI Radeon X1900 Video Card; 2GB of Free Hard Drive Space; DirectX 9.0c
Genre: Sim
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release date: Available now

Sometimes I look at my life and wonder why I didn’t choose to pursue one of those little-boy dreams, like becoming an astronaut. And then, every so often, along comes a video game like Moonbase Alpha to remind me. Mind you, I’m not knocking astronauts. I’m sure that, in reality, it’s really exciting to know that the only thing keeping you from being turned inside out is a thin piece of glass that’s mere inches from your nose. But when you strip away the lurking danger of the vacuum, the fact that a missing screw could ignite the hundreds of tons of rocket fuel you’re sitting on, the natural splendor of space, and the feeling of weightlessness, you’re really just a slow moving piece of meat in the middle of nowhere. And with Moonbase Alpha, you too can be a slow moving oaf in a spacesuit.

The game is set in the year 2025, in a space-station on the moon. As it turns out, one of the main drawbacks to living on the moon is that it has no atmosphere. Fortunately, the space station’s life support system fueled by solar energy. Unfortunately, the life support system doesn’t repel meteors. So, when a meteor crashes into the moon, damaging the system, you assume the role of the guy charged with fixing it.

Players choose from a number of tools in an equipment shed, lumber over to the damaged parts of the system, and repair them. Most of the tools simply require you to click and choose repair, but the welding tool brings up a sort of mini-game in which you can speed up the repairs by using the mouse to fix a circuit board. Additionally, certain areas of the station are so hazardous that you can’t approach them yourself, and must instead use a robot to complete the repairs.

This game is so committed to realism that it plays more like a simulator you might find at a museum than an actual video game. On the one hand, the graphics are great, and intellectually, it’s pretty cool to feel like you’re getting a legitimate feel for what this job would entail. On the other hand, all of the things that make the job interesting are pretty much absent, and the pace of the game is painfully sluggish. Furthermore, the controls can be unresponsive. The mouse in particular tends to be very jumpy.

The crux of the game is that you have a limited time in which to perform your repairs. This makes sense, because people on the base are eventually going to use up their oxygen. However, the time limit, combined with the cumbersome control system, is really all that makes the game difficult. For instance, your character can only hold one tool at a time, so you have to strategically plan where to drop your tools rather than dragging them back to the shed every time you need to switch out. Whether or not this is realistic is questionable, but in any case, it’s tedious.

It seems that NASA, in its attempt to recapture the minds and hearts of American youth, may have actually managed to make space travel seem more mundane than it is. In an attempt to create factual realism, they’ve sacrificed the emotional involvement that makes other games more interesting. While Moonbase Alpha might be an interesting academic exercise, it just isn’t much fun.

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Our Recommendation: