NASA, yes the US space agency, has put out Moonbase Alpha, a free educational game about what it takes to work in and survive the harsh environment that is the Moon. It’s pretty cool and of course slow going because, one movement too fast or strong and you could start flying away due to the low gravity. The game was built using the Unreal Engine and so is a fully immersive 3D environment, just like the real Moon!

The story goes that in 2020 NASA began construction of a Moon Base and now it’s fairly self-sustaining. All work and repairs are done on site. While returning to the base something goes wrong and you’re tasked with repairing the power grid to get the Oxygen generation system back online before time runs out. You can also choose to do free play which doesn’t really track time, essentially taking away the element of failure.

There’s only this one mission presently and you can play with up to three other people online in either a competitive or a co-op fashion. Why there would ever be a competition on a moonbase to repair a system as vital as O2 production is beyond me. I would think that NASA of all agencies would be promoting co-operation and not so much competition. Regardless, those are the two ways to play.

In the game you take control of a NASA astronaut in the third-person fashion and have to make various repairs  that require either a welding torch or a wrench. Sounds like a perfect environment where only two tools are needed to fix everything. You can also use  a remotely controlled robot to access areas that are harmful to you. However, you’re already in a space suit aren’t you? So how exactly the leaking coolant into an area that has almost no atmosphere could be harmful to you is beyond me. I’m guessing it was just a ploy to force you to use the robots.

One of the annoying things about the game is that every time the astronaut completes an action like repairing something, putting something down, etc, the camera fully reset to the standard position. It really slows things down and seems simply unnecessary.