Arcade Archives Moon Cresta

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1-2 Alternating (Local), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Moon Cresta, the first title in the Cresta series, is a Shmup released in 1980 in arcades. This modern release sees the game coming to PlayStation 4 in 2014 and Nintendo Switch in 2019.

Like many other Shmups of its era such as Space Invaders, Moon Cresta only allows players to move horizontally, firing up at enemies. Despite is age, Moon Cresta actually has some interesting mechanics in its gameplay that you don’t see very often in modern Shmups, such as a life system that has players taking on a different part of a multi-part ship with each life, with the first one the smallest but also the slowest and only having a single shot to fire at a time, but with successive ships letting you fire more but also providing enemies with a bigger target.

While there’s some good variety in the gameplay here with multiple enemy types and even a ship-docking bonus game, Moon Cresta unfortunately finds itself lacking due to poor hit detection and portions of the game where enemies spawn or act too fast for the player to react. Also, the slow firing speed of even the faster ships contrasted with the speed of enemies is really frustrating.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to score as much as they can in one run before seeing a game over screen. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes. In addition, this release of the game includes various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, and online leaderboards.

Also, I have to take a moment to point out that while I get that the Arcade Archives prices are all standardized, it is absolutely absurd that they’re charging $8 for a game that is as of this writing 45 years old. That’s just gross, and serves as an indictment against standardized pricing.

Overall, I think Moon Cresta was an ambitious Shmup for its time, but it just has not aged well, and unless you’re a historian or an absolutely dedicated fan of the genre, this is not a game you’ll likely want to spend money on.

tl;dr – Moon Cresta is a Shmup with a multi-part ship mechanic that’s really creative, especially for the time this game was originally released. Unfortunately, poor hit detection and frustratingly limited shot speed make this one difficult to recommend to anyone but the most diehard Shmup fans.

Grade: D+

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