Moons of Darsalon Review

I love a good retro throwback, be it a game of yesteryear getting another go or something new “in the spirit of”. Moons of Darsalon is an example of the latter, recalling aspects of Amiga and Commodore (ask your parents) games in certain respects, while having some more modern tech behind it. It’s all a little style over substance for me though, with the game lacking some fine tuning to really get the most out of the premise. 

The game plays out in a similar fashion to titles like Lemmings and Abe’s Odyssey. We traverse 2D levels of varying complexities, along the way rescuing other characters with the aim of getting them in one piece to the end of the stage. We can control them in a basic manner; telling them to follow or stop, or run left or right until they hit a wall. Other than that, it’s up to us to keep them alive through various means. 

The trailer here did it’s job – what a catchy song! Sadly, the game didn’t live up to expectations in our eyes

We can find tools in the levels to aid in this, from a jetpack to let us get up and over obstacles to several gun types, including a laser for fighting off foes, a lamp gun that shoots out lights that stick into surfaces, or a gun that builds ground up so we can create new pathways and fill in gaps. Using these is as simple as aiming and firing, but ammo is limited (although fairly generous).

Levels mix up the challenge by introducing various elements to test our abilities. One may have alien creatures to fight off while trying to defend the other astronauts, while another might simply be a series of steep inclines or dark caves to navigate. Each can be fairly short, though the challenge means a good amount of restarts and retries.

It’s this challenge that hasn’t quite won me over though. In the nature of being retro-styled, the controls can be a bit awkward, and the faux-pixellated filter can make it tricky to properly see what’s going on in the finer details.

Controlling our astronaut is simple but fiddly, especially when it comes to mantling up ledges (which seems to only work half of the time). But getting the rescuee’s in place is a pain in the ass. They follow us about but wont sit still unless we tell them to stop moving altogether, constantly jumping back and forth and running around us. This becomes especially annoying in later levels where we need to control separate groups, and it’s too awkward to tell one group to stay while trying to get another to move where we want them to go.

Levels can be insta-failed by one mistake (annoying if it’s right at the end of a tricky one) and while the astronauts are tough enough, we do have a certain number needed to reach the end of the level to pass it, and it’s all too easy for the aliens or enemy spacecraft to pin them (or us) down under constant fire, forcing us into a slow demise.

All of this leads to a more frustrating experience than we’d hoped for. Every time we feel like we start to find a flow with the game it soon bats us back down, and each time this happened we found it harder and harder to muster the enthusiasm to continue, until we simply ran out of steam with the game.

Conclusion

There is some fun to be found in Moons of Darsalon at times, and some of the more balanced levels offer a decent challenge. But too often I found myself cursing at the game for yet again killing me or making me fail more due to the fiddly mechanics than actual game design.

This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.

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Good
  • Decent retro aesthetic
  • Some nice ideas at times
Bad
  • Challenge is a wonky in terms of difficulty/pacing
  • Mechanics aren’t as fine tuned as we’d like
6
Okay
Written by
I've been gaming since Spy vs Spy on the Master System, growing up as a Sega kid before realising the joy of multi-platform gaming. These days I can mostly be found on smaller indie titles, the occasional big RPG and doing poorly at Rainbow Six: Siege. Gamertag: Enaksan

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