Moon Patrol

1982 games Atari games Apple games Atari ST games Commodore 64 games PC games

Japanese arcade game that was later cloned and adapted several times. On the surface of the Moon you patrol in small buggy while bad guys are trying to stop you.

Arcade games always had to be simple and yet entertaining to find a market - the controllers were not always up the scratch, the players had to be drawn by the outlook of the game, but at the same time not discouraged by the complexity. Moon Patrol is great example of the game that is simple, entertaining and not overloaded with story. Most of the people doesn’t even know what the story is, which doesn’t stop them to enjoy the game. The story itself is simple - as member of Moon Police we are set to patrol one of the sectors, where bad guys seem to hang out, so we jump into Moon buggy and set out to patrol the area. Just like it was expected the bad guys are not happy with our presence, so they try to stop us using different kind of traps and ambushes, including UFOs that drop the bombs on our heads.

The sector is split into checkpoints marked by letters (f.e. between letters A and E is one part of the sector, once we cross the E line we will return to that checkpoint if something will happen to us). After completing the whole sector we move to next one that has different background and slightly higher requirements. The game was developed by Japanese company Irem for arcades and later transferred to different platforms, not to mentioned cloned or copied to several others.

Our rating
★★★☆☆

Video
★★★☆☆

Audio
★★★☆☆

Playability
★★★★☆