Arcade Moonlander is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Moonlander (Copyright Jack Burness, 1973). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Jack Burness against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown.

Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Arcade Moonlander is not in any remarkable way any better than the 50 year old game the developer is ripping off (for profit). I think it's worth pointing out this game really was first made in 1973 (to celebrate the moon landings 4 years prior, and show off the capabilities of the BASIC programming language on the shiny new DEC GT40 graphical workstations of the time), but entered the burgeoning arcade series with a clone made by Atari in 1979, Lunar Lander.

What's the point of this history lesson? To demonstrate how completely and utterly derivative this ripoff is. And to also point out you can easily play Lunar Lander clones (which also haven't been actioned by the copyright holders, this is not a public domain franchise the developer is stealing here) for free on the web. But, I must stress, this is a for-profit ripoff of someone else's intellectual property (yes, game concepts are intellectual property and copyrightable, if unsure check out Tetris Holding, LLC vs Xio Interactive, Inc, 2012... and guess who won).

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The graphics here are some of the worst, laziest attempt at video game "art" I've ever seen. It's hard to suggest this game even has graphics. It's just untextured, basic pixel blocks and blobs, the kind that an infant child might be able to create in 5 minutes on MS Paint. It's clear the developer didn't even try to produce any real graphics for the game and just phoned it in. It's unclear why such a lazy approach was taken, whether it may be caused by lack of talent, budget, or motivation to do their job properly. It also doesn't matter... what matters is that this has resulted in a game with zero visual appeal for gamers. It's an immediate failure on that measure alone.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. The Unity Launcher is there, but the developer overrides those settings (why include them at all? Who knows?) There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The game contains stock/store assets/libraries/packages, but the "developer" here hasn't credited the people who actually did the work for the game. In some cases, audio samples from Twisted Lemon on Freesounds, this breaches the license agreement the developer signed for the use of those assets, which require adequate credits are included. The developer chose not to do that, but we've already seen them rip off other people's entire IP, so what's new? Claiming credit for the work of others as well as breaching software licenses is highly unethical. Gamers should be made aware when a developer behaves unethically and breaches license/copyright agreements, as buying games from unethical developers puts the gamers money at risk.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Arcade Moonlander is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.

It's fine. It'll keep you busy for a little bit. At $1 I can't complain.

Challenging and fun. For this price, it's a no-brainer.