Moon came after Dementium: The Ward as Renegade Kid's next entry in the very sparse DS FPS library, which by most people's reckoning numbers under 20, with most non-Renegade Kid titles being one-offs such as Metroid Prime Hunters and C.O.R.E.

Renegade Kid's work in this niche is certainly a valiant effort, with Dementium having been the byproduct of a failed pitch to release a Silent Hill game on DS— which, given what we know now about Shattered Memories, means they might have been on to something. Dementium certainly felt like a unique entry in the system's library, though that novelty is a bit worn down if you're going from that one to this for the sake of release chronology (which I hope you are).

While Dementium's plot and presentation made its Silent Hill influences pretty easy to guess, Moon's plot, which is entirely conveyed to you in the form of conveniently placed data terminals and dialogue scenes, instead makes me think that Renegade Kid's writing team could have done with a bit more practice. The plot of the game involves human astronauts discovering an unrecorded, clearly artificial hatch on the moon, and while I wouldn't dare spoil the plot of a 15 year old DS game that barely anyone played, I'm going to do so anyway: You gradually discover that the secret, killer drone-infested lunar facilities you then discover are owned and run by an evil group of aliens who have been kidnapping huge swathes of humans and squeezing their brain juice for a really long time so that they can secretly use it to manufacture illegal galactic meth. Which is also the same stuff you use to heal yourself in the game. These are the same aliens who were apparently the cause of the Roswell incident, and there's another human researcher who discovered these nefarious goings-on before you that is presumably the same guy who serves as your mysterious, faceless mission control for the penultimate part of the game, although this is never resolved. Admittedly, I'm not sure what kind of writing quality I could have realistically expected from a game with such a unique release profile, and it technically wasn't that different from how Dementium did it, but it felt rather more disappointing for the new setting nonetheless.

Gameplay wise, the game sometimes felt to me like "Metroid Prime Hunters with a bit more action going on", but going further into the game, that action quickly began to feel repetitive. The basic level loop is clearing out a series of rooms filled with enemies while en route to a series of objectives marked on your map, running into a save room on occasion and fighting a boss at the end. It's mostly just shooting stuff and trying not to die, but to break things up a bit there are sections where you have to navigate the handy-dandy Remote-Access Droid (RAD) you gain just a few minutes into the game through some narrow passageways to get to the other side of a force field and disable it so your fat ass can pass through. There's also a couple segments where you drive a nifty 4X4 through an obstacle course on the moon's surface. For the most part, the game does its job; even if it's nowhere near as unique or satisfying as, say, the puzzle design you would encounter when trying to navigate the maps in the (numbered) Metroid Prime games, the controls are responsive and easy to get used to, and it lends itself quite well to playing in short bursts, as you'd expect from a handheld game.

If you're like me, you'll spend most of the main gameplay loop of shooting stuff equipped with the Super Assault Rifle you get handed at the start of the game, which has the weakest offense out of all the weapons but is also the only one (other than the RAD's stasis cannon thing) that has unlimited ammo— quite a far cry from Dementium's survival horror-esque ammo rationing, but given that game's roots and how distant they are from this one, I'd say it's excusable. You do get encouraged to switch around once you start getting more guns, and ammo drops aren't hard to come by (and get fully refilled before every boss fight), but the SAR will do the job against the spooky alien drones you'll be fighting for most of the game. However, in the last handful of levels there does come a point where so many of those (and the aliens in mechsuits that eventually start showing up) get thrown at you that it becomes untenable to hold them back with the SAR alone and expect to survive, leading me to become acquainted with most of the alien guns only in the last couple hours of gameplay. As I recall, it was also shortly before then that I faced the last of the three "guardian" bosses (a term I only recall because it was a minor plot point) and died to it a bunch of times in frustration before coming to the realization that simply switching to a different weapon would make the battle ten times easier, even though I had never needed to do so up until that moment.

Speaking of the endgame, that was one aspect where I was silently hoping that this game would do better than Dementium, whose final chapter and boss is notoriously cheap— and I suppose I could say that managed to be the case in the end. As in its predecessor, the final major level of Moon is an unmapped series of rooms and corridors filled with lots and lots of baddies designed to deplete your ammo reserves if you want any hope of survival, but unlike Dementium, this game's final gauntlet is somewhat alleviated by the (probable, but not guaranteed) opportunity to get refills for both your preferred types of ammo and your health just by gunning down your enemies. More importantly, the final boss counts as its own "level" just as the other bosses do, so even if you end up falling to its somewhat unbalanced offensive tactics (which are still nowhere near as cheap as the final boss of Dementium), you can simply retry from the start of the battle instead of having to completely redo the grueling gauntlet that precedes it as in the last game.

And while we're on the ending, the final level and the staff roll feature what I believe were just about the only couple of notable tracks from the game's soundtrack, which mostly consists of spooky sci-fi cyberpunky ambient stuff, including what I suppose I would call the game's trademark morse code style beep-beep whenever you get an elevator ride FMV, a sound which you will also hear on the app preview for the game's episodic 3DS remake, Moon Chronicles (which, along with Dementium Remastered, I fully intend to play at some point).

Overall, Moon is certainly a curiosity in the DS library that I would recommend checking out if just the notion of a DS FPS sounds intriguing to you, or if any of what I've mentioned here is the sort of thing that makes you go "I need to check this out for myself." Other than the aforementioned 3DS remakes, that leaves Dementium II as the only notable Renegade Kid title for me to check out (other than Mutant Mudds, which is apparently the only game of theirs you're likely to have heard of)— and maybe once I'm done with that, I'll have to see if I can finally get the ill-fated PC version (which I got into my Steam library through a really bizarre interaction with some guy who wouldn't leave me alone until I agreed to trade steam cards with him) to go for more than a few minutes without softlocking.