Game Reviews: Red Moon

Red Moon is a game that's graphically beautiful that tries to make dumb excuses for why it isn't beautiful.

The game's graphics are simple and elegant, and they do what they need to do extremely well. And they look good.

But apparently the guy who made them is defensive about how he's not good at animating things that aren't silhouettes, because he came up with some stupid backstory about how the characters in his games are made of shadows (although this game doesn't mention that).

It's totally unnecessary, and almost completely irrelevant. You won't care what the characters are supposed to be made of, you'll be enjoying the game, including the graphics.

Anyway, gameplay is quite simple. You can perform very rapid attacks that generally stun your opponents; most combat is pretty one-sided even if you use only the most basic attack. You can crouch and hold down the attack button to do more damage with fewer attacks, although this is not often relevant-most enemies will go down quickly to a flurry of your weaker attacks. This includes lesser bosses.

A few areas into the game, your mentor tells you how to use power attacks, and here's where things get fun. Your power attack bar is filled by hitting enemies; the more you hit enemies, the faster it fills. When it's full, you can do this...

...which is even more awesome than it looks like, because it travels more than a full screen and kills most enemies instantly, throws back any enemies it somehow doesn't kill, and takes half of even a full-fledged boss's health. (Of course, you generally only get one per boss fight, even though the power attack will partly refill your power attack bar when it hits an enemy. If you hit enough enemies with it, you can potentially get something like half a bar back from a power attack.)

The game features wall jumps and double jumps, and while these are perhaps the most seamless implementations of such I've ever seen in a game, unfortunately the obstacles in later parts of the game are such that I personally can't get past a certain area which looks like it ought to be passable.

Up to that point, though, Red Moon is a blast to play and a visual treat, and I can heartily recommend it.

-Signing off.