Earth 2150: The Moon Project Review

Now we come to the most important thing you will notice when you start playing the missions. The tasks seem simple enough to perform, however you're gonna find that the opponent units are not that naïve and they will do almost anything in their power to stop you. You will realize that the enemy is quick and intelligent (a deadly combination), so you have to act swiftly, and with well-devised battle technique and defense tactic, unless you want to see your base turned into a scrap yard. There's the old tunnel-digging tactic, which allows you to sneak up behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. Even in these situations the enemy was on full alert and responded immediately to my surprise. However, you can use the Earthquake Generator while you move through the tunnel, which will heavily damage enemy constructions. This way you'll make the base much easier to conquer. Another new unit is available that goes by the strange nickname, Fat Girl. This unit has a very powerful armor and can take out quite a lot of enemy units. Also, a nice idea was realized with the new Unit Transporter, which can pick up enemy units and drop them on an enemy building, thus destroying both objects with one blow. Regrettably though, these new units won't in any way guarantee your victory over the ferocious AI.

There are a lot of unit commands that will let you form platoons, disband platoons, tell your unit to return to base and replenish his ammo, etc. A new interesting command has been introduced: namely you can switch your units' lights on or off, which presents a subtle but very important feature. It can be used when the Moon falls out of reach of Sunlight and it becomes pitch black. Moments like these improve verisimilitude and atmosphere.

As for the sound, things seem as spectacular as we expected. It offers more brilliant music tracks, which add a lot to the excitement while you charge against the enemy. These tracks can make you feel you're really a part of the whole 'Moon Project' story and perfectly become the visually striking environment. Further more, the music gets increasingly dynamic once you encounter enemy troops (which caused this reviewer to fall off his chair a few times).

On the visual side, this game has many dazzling qualities, from the beautiful shadowy terrain, to the visually stunning meteor showers. These small asteroids and comets, which hit the Moon's surface, present a constant danger for you and your vehicles. So it's not only an attractive environment detail, it can interact and influence your actions (rather like in real life). Explosions of the meteors look spectacular, as well as the explosions of the objects you destroy. Another interesting detail about these showers is that they happen when you least expect them to, and then when they do, as I said, they look really impressive. Further more, we can see a lot of nice landscapes of the Moon surface that is highly detailed even when you zoom up to the maximum. Dense fog, rain, and snow (on Earth, of course) remain the integral part of the environment. The 3D engine, in general, produces some truly gorgeous backgrounds and visual effects. Maybe the models could've used more polygons (ah, it's a RTS after all), otherwise they are smoothly animated and do not appear to bother your system too much. The technologically-advanced weaponry you use can also create some magnificent effects (the plasma gun looks particularly nice).

The downside of the game is, as I mentioned, the lack of more missions in the campaigns, which had been otherwise very well conceived. If you expected to see a lot of single player missions in the campaigns, you may be disappointed. Still, there is going to be enough of skirmish for you to play for days. In addition, level editing can be used to create missions to your preference and the multiplayer games are always loads of fun. Sadly, another setback comes with the main research facilities, which usually take too much time in completing their errands. This proved to be very frustrating since the enemy upgrades his units much faster than you; it makes the game twice as hard and very annoying. TopWare could have fixed this. All things considered, I think we can rather call this an excellent level editor with a lot of additional skirmish missions, rather than a truly innovative expansion pack.