MoonStrike Review – PC VR

This is going to be one of those short and sweet reviews because the new PC strategy game, MoonStrike is just as short and just as sweet and falls into that rarely explored genre of VR games; real-time strategy.   We’ve all seen it in our favorite sci-fi movies; massive holographic displays depicting galactic warfare between planets with variable size fleets engaging in epic space battles. Well now all of that comes to stunning life in VR for Vive and Rift owners willing to immerse themselves in single and multiplayer space battles.

Perhaps the single best element of MoonStrike is its simplicity and charm, and you should easily master the concepts of the game before you even finish the multi-page tutorial. The charm part comes in the form of witty humor buried in the text of the tutorial (I still laugh when it tells me to turn around to see the scoreboard) and the adorable designs for the various alien races and ships you are about to attack.

The rules of MoonStrike are ever-so simple and basically follow the core concept of the board game RISK. You have planets/moons of various sizes that produce spaceships at a rate based on the size of the planet. You need to attack all enemy planets to conquer and convert them to your race’s color. To do this you click on one of your planets and drag your space armada to a target alien world. The planet with the superior number of ships wins the planet. It truly is a numbers game, but there is so much underlying strategy.

Depending on your chosen race your faction has varying levels of ship production, speed, and battle perks. You have to anticipate enemy attacks and not send all your ships out to conquer while leaving your own planets defenseless, and there are also space encounters. When two fleets cross paths there will be a space battle effectively reducing numbers, so the 20 ships you sent to attack the planet with 10 might only have 8 when it arrives and you lose the battle. There are some advanced tactics and controls like being able to manually select how many ships you want to send into battle versus sending the full fleet.  My only gameplay issues is that once a faction hits a certain tipping point it’s hard for them to lose, as they sweep the board with their unstoppable superior numbers. This can happen several minutes before the actual end of the match and is not fun for the losing factions.

Each game session lasts 10-15 minutes and can get quite frantic at times. You are totally immersed in this stylized galactic map with planets swirling around you and ships flying literally inches from your nose. At any time you can glance over your shoulder to see the scoreboard. There is no real UI and you only see ship numbers when you hover over a planet. There are three sizes of ship icons representing clusters of ships so the game never gets too littered with tiny elements. Everything is big, bold, and colorful.

I played MoonStrike on both the Rift and Vive and the game was equally fun and playable on both with great motion controls and crisp visuals thanks to the simplistic art style that wasn’t trying to do more than VR can handle or this game needed. The 3D wow factor is really on point with this game, and you really feel like you are standing in the middle of a hologram…and yes, you pretty much need to stand to play this game; although there is a nice feature that allows you to extend your reach to grab distant planets.

My only complaint with MoonStrike is the lack of multiplayer competition; a sentiment shared by several on the Steam page. While I have had countless hours of fun playing against the variable skilled AI it’s been nearly two months since this game released and I still haven’t found one, let alone two players for online battle. Just know that if you do get MoonStrike you’ll likely be playing alone. Perhaps a future sale will stimulate the player base, but even playing alone there is enough variety in the AI challenge and the unique racial advantages to keep you playing and replaying longer than you’d expect.

MoonStrike takes the global domination theme of RISK and takes it to the galactic level with the same board game simplicity of rules, colors, and the basic concept of superior numbers then ices the cake with some of the best VR immersion of recent memory. This game would be totally forgettable on a standard screen but the clever use of VR really makes this game special and a must play for any RTS fan with a VR headset.

Author: Mark Smith
I've been an avid gamer since I stumbled upon ZORK running in my local Radio Shack in 1980. Ten years later I was working for Sierra Online. Since then I've owned nearly every game system and most of the games to go with them. Not sure if 40+ years of gaming qualifies me to write reviews, but I do it anyway.

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