Moon Tycoon

                    Demo reviewed by Sue

I was walking Robbie one day, thinking about the Impressions
series of games - Caesar, Cleopatra and Emperor etc. And I
thought, I wonder why they haven't done one of their games set in
space. I started to imagine all the features it could have. In my
head, it was fun! When I got back home, I looked at one of the
download sites to find someone had already done one. It's called
Moon Tycoon and it comes from Anarchy Enterprises through
www.moontycoon.com who released it in 2001.

The demo is 34.5 meg in size. It downloaded as a zip file
containing a self extracting executable. Once installed and
running, you can start to play. You can't save or load the demo -
fair enough. There is a tutorial and a standard game which is a
goal-less, sandbox level. Though there are buttons to access three
campaign games, these are empty though in the full game they
contain a number of missions that must be completed in sequence.

For a successful moon colony, you need a number of things.  First
is a control centre. Next are tubes to connect this to other
buildings. These can be straight or in a cross shape. There are
also underground tubes to help you reach inaccessible areas such
as on high ground. You need to build plants to produce
electricity, water and oxygen then organise contact with other
planets by means of a landing pad. At this stage you can start to
think about trade. Maybe you can mine useful elements and export
them?

There are several drawbacks with the demo. One is that it only
runs for 5 game years. Putting the speed up so that buildings are
constructed quickly means you run out of time before the tutorial
finishes. The way round it is to put the speed back to low once
buildings are finished. The demo also has a number of major
features disabled eg I couldn't tell when my mining probe was in
the best area because I wasn't told what the concentration of ore
was. If you click on a building you should be told its stats in
terms of the number of people, oxygen, water and electricity
needs. Again this doesn't work. So if you click on the mine, you
don't know if it's producing anything and you also can't tell if
the warehouse connected to it is full or empty.

The standard game lets you change the amount of money you start
with, the terrain type, how long the life of the buildings is and
the richness of the mine resources to tweak the game's difficulty
level. In the full game you can set up a colony on the moon or an
asteroid. The demo only has the moon option.

I felt I was getting on fairly well but not being able to access
ANY info screens was a big drawback. At this point I gave up. If
you're going to put out a demo, Anarchy Enterprises, make sure
it's worth playing and will encourage people to buy the full game.
This has 30 missions built round a storyline of three campaigns
and there are more industries, disasters and other features.
Sadly the demo has put me off too much to try it! One day maybe
Impressions will bring out a space based game. Now I'm sure that
would be worth playing.
                              - o -