Moon Diver (PS3, X360) (2011)
Developer: Feel Plus

Review by Faididi and Co.

Counting sheep is just as boring, but at least it doesn't cost you a dime

Story: Below Average

The evil demon king decides on a whim to annihilate humankind, so he sends forth his hordes of undead-like cybernetic monsters. Luckily for us, a bunch of ninja dressed in butt-ugly outfits appear from nowhere to fight him. Had the story just stopped there, it would've been fine. Instead, each stage opens with gibberish of the heroes making nonsensical comments or of the villain spewing out shitty poetry. The human armies are mentioned but never actually appear in the game (thanks for not lending a hand, guys), and the ending is so insubstantial that it forgets to lead into the staff credits.

Gameplay: Average

Released as a downloadable game, Feel Plus' Moon Diver is a 4-Player side-scrolling action platformer with lots of sword-slashing and surface-climbing challenges. It takes after Capcom's Strider, but its cooperative multiplayer aspects make it better compared with Hori Electric's Run Saber and Sammy's Dyna Gear. The futuristic ninja heroes will cut down hordes of enemies as they run, jump, wall-scale, and ceiling-swing their way together through 12 lengthy stages.

Of course, this game offers a few features not found in the past classics. First on the list is the magic system. When their standard sword attacks aren't enough, the heroes can use their limited amount of magic energy to cast various spells, like recovering their stamina, shooting projectiles, or temporarily boosting their offensive strength. The heroes can each equip up to 4 spells, but more importantly, many of the spells can be freely enhanced by fellow heroes, which is a great way to encourage teamwork.

Next, the heroes can improve their core abilities. As the heroes gain in experience level by beating up bad guys, they'll earn upgrade points that can be used to increase their stamina capacity, magic capacity, and attack power. You can have your favorite characters enhanced evenly across every attribute or focused more on specific traits.

Then, there is the offline and online multiplayer support. Moon Diver lets 4 Players share the same console locally or lets you join three separate Players online. The online side also has a join-in-progress feature, letting allies jump into the action with greater ease. This is definitely one of those games meant to be enjoyed with friends, because getting wasted when you're playing solo results in an instant Game Over, while the heroes can freely revive each other (or simply wait to respawn) when there are multiple Players.

Despite all that, however, Moon Diver also suffers from serious flaws that can't be brushed off. In contrast to the truly creative Run Saber, this game has horrendously dull level and enemy designs. A dozen stages may make it much longer than the classics, but only because these stages copy rooms and corridors to the point of nausea, and they run together so much that one wonders if places like Stages 2 and 3 or 7 and 8 are really just the same bunch of areas fed through random dungeon generators. The bad guys are more repetitive and dimwitted than zombies, and the few bosses and minibosses are recycled throughout the game. Bizarrely, the plain-looking turrets are the most dangerous foes, simply because they react faster than the brain-dead enemy soldiers.

Not helping is the lack of meaningful differentiation among the heroes. All of them share the same moves, run at the same speed, and can acquire the same magic spells, so there's no point in playing anyone except the guys with the highest attack power. Furthermore, while gender biases are as common here as in other games, Moon Diver really shafts the two female playable characters by making them physically flimsier than tissue paper. Possessing more magic energy to cast healing spells is useless when a single laser scratch will outright vaporize them, and something is seriously wrong when the macho dude heroes can continue to deal and suck up more punishment at Level 10 than their fairer colleagues at Level 50.

Controls: Poor

The controls are nowhere as smart as they should be. Moon Diver unintuitively assigns the crouching maneuver to a shoulder button, not letting you press Down to make your character duck. At the same time, the game fails to tie the magic spells to hot-key buttons for quicker use, instead forcing you to fumble with the D-Pad to select which spell to cast.

The heroes' progress data is nonsensically handled. The stage completion and the collected spells are oddly recorded with each individual character instead of being shared across your entire profile, and there is no way to reallocate a hero's upgrades except to reset that hero's growth and start from scratch again.

Shittiest of all are the online-related controls. In the online mode, you can't skip the stages' intro movies, and you can't leave the party from the lobby menu; you must load the next stage before you can exit the session, and that is completely retarded.

Graphics: Average

Moon Diver's characters are designed by Roberto Ferrari. For whatever that's worth, they're barely distinguishable from the eyesore-inducing type of anime figures whom no one remembers clearly for long. Half of the heroes look like a cross between street skaters and rag-draped hobos, while the enemy soldiers and the scenery all blur together into depressing industrial globs of gray and more gray.

Audio: Average

The cutting, hacking, and magic-blasting sound effects are loud enough, but the uninspired music is as forgettable as the bulk of the game. The only bright spot is that the original voice acting is left untouched across all versions of Moon Diver, although the vocal effects are limited to fighting cries and grunts. (The speech is conveyed solely through text.)

Overall: Below Average

Moon Diver can be a lot more impressive as an action platformer. Padding out the length of the stages by endlessly repeating identical corridors and enemies just makes everything boring. Having different playable characters doesn't mean a damn when they all share the same abilities but half of them are arbitrarily penalized with glaringly low stats. The unintuitive controls make crouching and using spells more difficult than they should be, while the online mode's missing options for exiting lobbies and skipping cutscenes are a gigantic pain in the ass. There are far more interesting and better-made cooperative action games to try before anyone should waste their time on this.

Expansion: Below Average

Moon Diver has so-called downloadable content, but they're really just digital keys to access content within the original files. The first piece of DLC is arguably the only worthwhile one, because it offers the extra playable character of Silence, who is ridiculously overpowered and gives you no reason to bother with the original quartet of heroes (unless you want Trophies/Achievements). It throws in one score-attack stage, too. The rest of the DLC provides either more score-attack stages or access to the chain-attack mode, all of which are unspectacular and should've been available by default. If you're disappointed by the core game, don't bother with its DLC.