On the 4th July in the UK, game developer SideQuest studios released a role-playing game called Rainbow moon, which came out on the PSN/SEN. I was interested in getting this game after watching a trailer I downloaded from the PlayStation store, and couldn’t wait for the 4th to roll around. When it did, I downloaded the game at the earliest opportunity, and was eager to play. Between yesterday and today, between caring for my family, sleeping, eating and writing this review, I’ve clocked up 10 hours of game time. That’s in a window of about 30 hours since downloading it.

Rainbow Moon is a new RPG game that is in an old-school RPG mould. After a very short intro (just over two minutes in length), you’re released into the game world and given small snippets of information about how to play the game. While these little tutorial bits are portioned out, you’re given quests to do, doing various little jobs here and there, collecting rewards, usually in the form of equipment or keys for the next lock which you’ll need to access the next area. After getting to the next area, it’s more of the same, with quests consisting of finding a person or item and liberating them or it from a dungeon. It sounds simple and it is. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, as a lot of games nowadays can end up getting overly complicated.

When it comes to battling, the fight system plays like a cross between a normal turn based RPG and a game of chess. Characters move about a grid system battlefield, with different attacks affecting different squares in relation to that characters position, making it possible to attack multiple enemies who may not be standing next to each other. With this sort of system, battles can become quite strategic, and with enemy numbers ranging from one to God-knows-where (the most I’ve encountered is eight), battlefields can be quite claustrophobic. Get your characters in the wrong positions and you can be surrounded quite quickly. Unfortunately, this can happen quite a bit, mainly because the controls can take some getting used to.

Graphically, the game is quite strong, with more than a passing resemblance to games gone-by. It’s a game with bright colours, with enemies that are quite numerous, that get recycled with a colour change every so often, and with a game world that never looks bland. Audibly, the game never seems to either excel or disappoint, with the biggest talking point being NPC speech, or rather lack of. An NPC may say “Hello” and “Goodbye”, but that’s it, which I think is a good thing. All other speech is presented in speech bubbles, which not only echoes RPG’s of old but also saves hard drive space. The whole game weighs in at a bit under 2GB in size.

Other than the controls, the only problem with the game that I can see is the almost none-existent storyline. While the combat system will be enough for a lot of people, the lack of storyline might put a lot of others off, and given the developers are expecting people to play the game for over 100 hours, the lack of story is quite off-putting. Overall, I think that for me personally, it’s a great game, I can overlook the controls and storyline, and at £10, it’s unbelievable value, but I do think this is a game for solid RPG fans. It certainly won’t be winning over any new fans for the genre though.