MewnBase

Survival on an alien planet is still a pretty challenging concept nowadays, even if people have managed to land on the Moon a few decades ago. Walking around for a few minutes is troublesome enough, but things get really complicated once you think about how humans could live for years on end on a planet that has no liquid water supply and no breathable air available.

MoonBase is a pretty simple survival game in which your sole purpose is to survive for a set number of days, using nothing but the resources you find lying around on a deserted planet. Your pioneer needs food and Oxygen in order to stay alive, not to mention living quarters and a power supply to keep all of this working at all times.

The workbench is where you can craft useful items and new modules for your base, although that’s not as important as the actual survival. Food and Oxygen are your most pressing concerns, because the game ends if you run out of either of them. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to enjoy the other features of the game, because you’ll constantly be running around trying to find plants instead of expanding your base or collecting resources.

Speaking of which, maybe it would be a good idea to include some sort of food production facility, because the plants you have to collect are spread all over the map, and it actually forces you to do nothing else but search for them and come back for Oxygen every now and again. You also need two plants in order to craft one food ration, and it only lasts you for a minute or so anyway before the player gets hungry again.

Other than that, the game has potential, especially since it appears to be pretty fast-paced and engaging. You can also collect ice and turn it into water, but there doesn’t seem to be anything useful about it yet. Granted, the game is still in development, so it’s only natural that it lacks some features. The interface is quite clean and accessible, except maybe that there doesn’t seem to be a scrolling option for the inventory, which is a problem when you are carrying too many items.

All things considered, MoonBase is still in a pretty rough state, but there’s true potential here that can be unlocked with just a little more effort. Hence, if more features are added and the gameplay is balanced in such a way as to allow you to do something other than run around looking for plants all day, this could certainly turn into a very fun experience.