Battlefield Moon

Battlefield Moon is a homage to the inventive 8-bit real-time strategy era, a tribute of sorts to the groundbreaking Nether Earth that was the first to offer truly real-time strategy gameplay.

As one of the first games to truly adopt real-time gameplay, Nether Earth attained cult status, but didn’t set the world alight in terms of sales – so you’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of it before.

But the road to gameplay hell is paved with good intentions. While Battlefield Moon tries hard to capture the spirit of its ancestors, it suffers from plodding gameplay that makes it more outdated than the game it emulates.

Set across four different lunar battlegrounds, the game is a contest between two rival commanders. Each has a base at one end of the level, which is capable of producing combat drones of three distinct varieties.

The most basic is a walker variant - this has slow mobility and would probably lose out to your granny in a 100-metre sprint.

At the other end of the scale there’s the advanced hover droid, which is the fastest unit available. In the middle is the tank variant.

With these electronic underlings at your bidding you have to completely destroy your opponent before they have a chance to return the favour.

Nothing comes for free, of course, and you have to wait for cash to accumulate over time before you can build more units. By capturing neutral bases dotted around the map you can not only boost the amount of money you receive, but also purchase upgrades for your robots such as improved radar detection, better armour and powerful missiles.

Although your units possess a degree of intelligence, they regularly need assistance in order to get the job done. You can influence proceedings a little more directly by using your airborne control module - essentially a mini UFO.

Using a virtual twin-stick control control scheme, you can glide elegantly around the lunar landscape, observing the actions of your burgeoning army.

If things become really dire you can even take direct control of a unit by hovering over it and tapping the appropriate command. You’re then thrust into a first-person view where you're able to move robots around and discharge weapons at nearby belligerents.

From this mode it’s also possible to assign tasks to that particular unit. For example, you can tell it to defend a specific position, engage nearby enemies, or head for the closest base and invade it.

It’s actually possible to give a robot more than one order, although doing so reduces its efficiency – presumably because it's running on clapped-out hardware that's incapable of multitasking.

Battlefield Moon certainly has the ingredients of an engaging and cerebral experience, yet sadly the execution is underwhelming. It's a game packed with promise that fails to deliver on its potential.

The biggest issue is that everything moves painfully slowly. Even your fastest robots lumber along with all the grace of an arthritis-ridden tortoise with bunions. This irksome issue is compounded by the fact that every unit you construct is about as intelligent as a toaster.

Even when given explicit orders, many droids wander aimlessly in circles, confused by the insultingly basic lunar terrain. This makes it incredibly tempting to assume direct control of your robots via your control module and direct the battle yourself - but, again, the lack of pace makes this a painful option.

There’s no actual progression to the game, either. You’re given four maps, although there’s no campaign. This choice is made all the more bizarre when you consider the absence of multiplayer.

When you have a game which features two evenly-matched commanders facing off against one another, surely it’s a given that you should be able to play against a fellow human.

To cap things off, Battlefield Moon is a pretty unattractive game, with crude 3D visuals and horrendous pop-up when you’re in first-person viewpoint. The menus and title screen are also of a low quality, festooned with laughably blurry imagery.

While developer ASD Soft no doubt hoped that it would bring the classic gameplay of Nether Earth up-to-date, Battlefield Moon in fact does the exact opposite. Poor presentation, clumsy AI, and slovenly speed hold it back.