Who didn’t want to be an astronaut once upon a time? Rockets, weightlessness and walking on the moon looked really cool. NASA are trying to bring our dreams crashing into harsh reality, with their free educational game Moonbase Alpha.
It could be fantastic – multiplayer missions on the Moon to save the base after a destructive meteor shower. It features a moon-buggy and robots! Unfortunately, Moonbase Alpha doesn’t feature Bruce Willis, and is designed with team-building and realism in mind.
In my first half an hour, I walked and jumped gracefully, but really slowly around the moonbase. I picked up a welder, drifted towards electrical units that were broken, and fixed them slowly. I then drifted back to the toolshed, to grab a wrench. Did you know astronauts can’t carry more than one object at a time? Using the moon-buggy speeds things up, as you can load items onto it, one by one, and move a lot faster. But it’s still hardly exciting.
You can play multiplayer online, which would be much more interesting, but it’s currently very difficult to find servers and active games. Moonbase Alpha is available for Windows via Steam, and it’s totally free, so you can easily find out if you have what it takes to live on the Moon – do you have that much patience? The Moon would be much more fun if it was being invaded my aliens, in my opinion…
