Colonization of the Moon

I want to be the advocate for the underdog here, genuinely, but Colonization of the Moon makes that hard. The premise flips the usual lunar-invasion script: you are the alien, stationed on the left side of a 2D side-scrolling screen, and waves of humans are the ones storming your home. There is something quietly funny about that inversion, and for a moment it sparks genuine curiosity. Then you pick up the mouse and reality arrives quickly. The core loop is about as stripped-down as arcade shooting gets. Left-click fires a standard gun at the incoming humans; right-click triggers a flamethrower. The fence behind your alien acts as a last line of defense if enemies breach your position. That is essentially the whole mechanical vocabulary. The Steam page tags nod toward tower defense and real-time tactics, but what you actually get is closer to a fixed-position gallery shooter with two buttons. Difficulty does scale upward across levels, and the gun alone reportedly struggles to keep pace at higher settings, making the flamethrower less of a secondary option and more of a necessity. Whether that constitutes depth or just friction is something you will decide inside the first ten minutes. The pixel art sits in a retro, 1990s-adjacent aesthetic that the Steam tags describe as atmospheric, and there is a background music track the developer clearly put care into. Those two things, the visual palette and the soundtrack, are where the handcraft shows through most honestly. For a sub-five-dollar micro-release bundled inside a large publisher collection, the atmosphere punches slightly above its weight class. The problem is that atmosphere alone cannot paper over how little is here. With only three user reviews on Steam since its 2018 release and no critical coverage anywhere, there is no community to tell you whether the level count justifies repeated sessions or whether the difficulty curve has any satisfying arc. The honest read: this is a tiny arcade release with one compelling concept twist - the perspective reversal of humans-as-invaders - wrapped around a core that never develops beyond its opening minute. If you pick it up inside a bundle and have twenty minutes to spare, the alien-defender hook and the retro soundtrack make it a tolerable curiosity. Going out of your way for it as a standalone purchase is a harder sell, especially when the player reception footprint is so faint that the game has effectively vanished from public conversation since launch.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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