Through Insanity And Beyond: A Lunar Lander Beyond Review

By Manuel

Players: 1
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, XBox, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Atari VCS, PC

Atari has really been on top of things when it comes to releasing new reimaginings of their classic titles. Pong, Berzerk, and Gravitar all got remake treatment recently, and now it's time for Lunar Lander to take the spotlight! Lunar Lander Beyond is a totally modern take on the classic arcade game, and it's out now on just about every platform imaginable. We're going to be taking a look at the version available on the Nintendo Switch, but I'm sure that everything I'm about to say will apply to all other versions. While I've enjoyed many of the recent Atari releases, I can't help but wonder if that streak will continue here. There's only one way to find out! It's time to dive in!

Who needs training?

Oh no, that can't be good!

Lunar Lander Beyond puts you into the shoes of a newly-recruited captain of the Pegasus Corporation. It's your job to make sure your crew fulfills whatever tasks the company needs you to complete, and you'll quickly learn that Pegasus is not afraid to admit that it puts profits before people. While the game starts out with you guiding your roster of pilots in rather mundane busywork, things escalate quickly when a cosmic anomaly seems to warp the very fabric of reality itself. Suddenly you find yourself performing more rescues and defense missions than the company may have initially wanted, and the ship's crew grows with each passing mission. While there are rather generic pilots that come and go, the main cast help move the story along. There's a bit more to the plot than just company work and cosmic anomalies, but I don't think it's worth outlining more than I already have within a review. That said, I was surprised to find such a well-written story in a game that I assumed wouldn't have one, but that actually outlines of the first issues I have with the game. Even though Lunar Lander Beyond is a reimagining of a classic arcade game, there is no other mode available to players besides the main story campaign. Not including a standard Arcade Mode seems almost criminal in a game like this, and it really would've helped in getting new players acclimated to some of the odd ways the game plays. Even though I think the main campaign is well-executed and paced, it's just the first of many places where the game comes up a bit short.

I have very limited experience with the original Lunar Lander arcade game, but I remember hearing tales about its insane difficulty and complex control scheme. While I can't really compare either of those to Lunar Lander Beyond, I can say that the difficulty has apparently remained intact despite the intervening decades. Fans will probably be glad to hear that there's even a complicated control scheme, but we'll get to that in a minute. Choosing difficulty in Lunar Lander Beyond is one of the most important decisions you can make, as it'll determine how playable the game is for you. I tried out all the difficulties for the purposes of this review, and I honestly can't figure out exactly who the harder ones were made for. Let me start by admitting right off the bat that the only playthrough I completed was on Easy, as even Normal proved to be too much for me. I'm not one to balk from difficult games, but there's something about controlling your ship in Lunar Lander Beyond that just feels like the entire game is stacked against you even on the lowest difficulty. If you want to set things to insane, I'm not going to stop you, but rest assured that the game will become nearly unplayable. I don't know what kind of masochist would want to put themselves through the hardest difficulty, but I have to guess that there's at least one person who thinks this game is way too easy. I bring up the fact that I played in on Easy mainly because I wanted to frame everything I'm going to say about the game around that. If you think I'm describing a game that sounds far too hard and complicated for its own good, then rest assured that it's actually even MORE difficult than I'm probably letting on. And if you're looking for a game that will make you tear your hair out in frustration, then you might want to stop reading this review and just buy it already.

Running out of fuel is instant death.

It does feel good clearing stages.

As the name implies, you'll be doing a lot of take offs and landings in Lunar Lander Beyond. This usually means picking up or dropping off cargo or passengers, and trying to keep your ship in one piece along the way. Your ship can only take a certain amount of damage before it explodes, but chances are something else will force you to restart long before you reach that point. Harder difficulties give you penalties if you repeatedly die in a mission, but you can pretty much do that to your heart's content on my favorite easy mode. Besides ship health, you'll also have to worry about fuel, and if you fly outside of your mission area your ship will explode. In short, there's a lot of ways to die, and not all of them are fun. You eventually have a group of pilots that each have their own skills, and you also have four ships that each have their own speed, controls, and abilities as well. Most of what I'm going to lay out next goes for all pilots and ships, so we'll just take a broad overview of things.

Controlling your ship is not at all what players of other space games might expect. Instead of controlling the ship directly, you adjust its direction in a 360 loop, and then use your thrusters to launch the ship in the direction it's currently facing. You can adjust your movement from there, and even provide more thrust, but you're pretty much locked into whatever path you chose. The only way to really control your ship is to wait for your thrust to run out, and adjust your trajectory manually. This leads to controls that feel far more complicated than they need to be, but I can understand having them in this game since the original was notorious for its controls. There are also several abilities/power-ups you can apply to your ship to help movement. These can be boosters that shoot you in your currently facing direction even faster, tractor beams that grab survivors and items that are near your ship, and the most important of them all, the stabilizers. You get the stabilizers early on, and it's these that truly make the game playable. They not only can fully stop your ship in its tracks, but they're also used to slow your descent when you need to land. These would be a saving grace of the control scheme, but like all power-ups, they use a lot of fuel. Fuel management will eventually become the bane of your existence, as many later missions will force you to land and refuel multiple times before completion. While I do understand making these power-ups limited, tying them to a gauge that's just as important as your life bar just feels cruel. I found that I rarely used them as just dying and restarting from the last checkpoint was often far less time consuming and troublesome then finding a source of fuel in a level.

This opening cutscene is great.

I thought I was able to land there...

There's one more important aspect to discuss when it comes to gameplay, and that's the sanity meter. Taking a page from Eternal Darkness' playbook, Lunar Lander Beyond has a sanity meter that rises each time you take damage. All sorts of strange hallucinations start to appear as this meter goes up, and it'll eventually top out the more damage you take or if you accidentally interact with any of the hallucinations. This eventually can lead to you crashing your ship, but you are able to regain some sanity by picking up pill power-ups. This is a very cool system when it's first introduced, and it is a very interesting idea, I quickly found that I didn't like the fact that sanity never goes down on its own. Finishing a level doesn't reset it to zero, and the only way to get it down is to send your pilot off to a psychiatrist, or to pump them full of pills. I'm not even joking about that by the way, this game literally has space psychiatrists. The problem with quick treatments is that they cost a lot of credits, and the longer ones put the pilot of commission for several missions. You do eventually get more pilots, but I wonder how this works in the harder difficulties that include pilot permadeath. Also, the fact that sanity rises with ship damage, but health pickups are far more common than pills, means that the sanity meter actually becomes far more important than your ship's life bar. Even though I thought it was one of the coolest aspects of the game at first, I eventually grew to hate the sanity system as it would force me to use pilots I hadn't properly leveled up. Like a lot of things about this game, it falls just short of being well-implemented.

I have a lot of mixed feelings as to how good a game Lunar Lander Beyond actually is. There were times where I felt the entire thing was broken, and there were just as many times where I found myself having a lot of fun. The problems arose when I remembered that I was mostly playing the game on easy mode, and that things were probably just as unplayable as I imagined them to be in the other difficulty settings. This still doesn't make Lunar Lander Beyond a bad game, but it did make me have a lot of mixed feelings about it. The biggest saving grace for the game had to be the sheer variety it offered, and its surprisingly good story. There's a surprising amount of level variety, and I actually found it somewhat strange that you rarely seemed to do the same thing twice in-game. Missions can be rescues, dropping off cargo or supplies, defending a base, outrunning something, navigating a tight cave, and so on. And like I said before, there's even the variety in the ships and pilots. The game was never boring, and I appreciated the fact that it did a lot in its relatively short runtime. The story also kept me around as I grew to like most of the characters, and there's a dry humor to everything that was right up my alley. Once again, I found myself wishing that the game had some sort of Arcade Mode where you could do challenges without any story interaction at all, but that's probably more of a nitpick than anything. Then again, wishing I could just drop in and out of the gameplay quicker probably speaks volumes about how much I enjoyed the core gameplay despite my complaints.

Be careful going insane.

I wonder who pays for their insurance.

Even though I go back and forth regarding how much I like the gameplay, there's no denying that Lunar Lander Beyond has some amazing graphics and animation. The animated cutscene that opens the game really sets a stage for what's to come, and the entire game has a scope that's hard to describe in writing. You may notice that there are some screenshots where the ship seems almost miniscule, and those come from when the game pulls the camera way back and shows off more of the current planet you're on. These parts of the game do a good job of making you feel like an insignificant cog in a big machine, and I'm not joking when I say that it goes along with one of the central themes of the story. Then there's the level of detail in the backgrounds, with each planet feeling truly alive. Structures look functional, there are landmarks, and you even see workers on the ground. There's a hand-drawn smoothness to everything that's hard to see outside of the game being in motion, but there were several times where the graphics very nearly took my breath away. Also, in case you're wondering, the game ran very well on the Nintendo Switch, and I barely noticed any issues worth noting. Character designs are great, even simple things like the menus look sharp, and I honestly can't find very much to complain about when it comes to the visuals. Rather than try to find some small negative to harp on, I guess I'll just move on.

I probably have less to say about the music in Lunar Lander Beyond than the graphics, but I was impressed by what was here nonetheless. I have to admit that there weren't any tracks that I would say stuck out to me in particular, nor can I recall any memorable melodies as I write this, but every part of the sound design added to the game's atmosphere. As you might expect from a game like this, much of the music is electronic, and a lot of it has a very John Carpenter-esque synthesized vibe to it. Some tracks sound moody or almost scary when they need to, others are the right level of energetic electronica that kept me in the game, and others still echoed the insanity I was witnessing on-screen. The music is perfectly placed in the game, even if it's not a soundtrack that I'm going to run out and buy as soon as I'm done with this review. Then there's the game's voice acting. Straight to the point, the voice acting in Lunar Lander Beyond is some of the best I've ever heard, and every single actor puts in a commendable performance. I like to point out in reviews for smaller titles that adding in voice acting is probably the easiest way to up presentation and production values for the casual player. Having good voice acting does wonders for smaller indie titles, and I have no complaints at all on that front. The ship's dry delivery is one of the funniest things I've ever heard, and it really drives the game forward.

RIP the city I guess.

Am I one of the drunks?

Before I wrap up this review, I want to mention my two other problems with the game besides its questionable gameplay: its price and its replayability. Coming in at $29.99, I can't help but feel that its current price point is just a bit too high. I will say that the production values to meet that price point are mostly there, and I can agree that not every indie title has to be priced under $20, but I don't know if the amount of content here is worth that price. Lunar Lander Beyond will definitely eat up hours of your time simply due to you dying over and over again, but it isn't a long game by any means. Some players are sure to find replayability in tackling the challenge of a higher difficulty, but beyond that I'm not sure why you'd go back to it once you've beaten it. You can of course play any stage you've already beat if you want to do better, try out a different ship/pilot combo, or simply give it another go, but the lack of a standalone Arcade or Free Mode really hurts the overall value of the game. I don't want to go too hard on something like a game's price point, but I do think that it's an easy way to make picking up a game a sure thing for potential players who might be on the fence.

This was one of my favorite early missions.

I hate tight spaces in this game.

Even though I don't think I can give Lunar Lander Beyond the widest of recommendations, I can say that I think it's worth picking up if you come into it with the right expectations. If you're looking for a brutally tough game, or if you like your space adventures to be lighter on the shooting but heavier on the insanity, then this is the game for you. Obviously if you're an Atari fan, or just a fan of the original arcade game, then you're going to want to pick it up as well. Everyone looking for something a bit more laid back or chill? You're going to want to stay away for your own sanity. After all, it's not just the pilots in-game that will start to see hallucinations when the game starts throwing nonsense at you. And not all of us can get those ever-necessary pills.

Check Out Lunar Lander Beyond on Nintendo Switch:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/lunar-lander-beyond-switch/

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Story: B
Gameplay: B-
Graphics: A+
Music/Sound: A
Value: B-

Overall: B

Pros:
+ Captures the original Lunar Lander gameplay and gives it all sorts of new twists.
+ The story is far better than I thought it would be, and features several memorable characters.
+ Smooth animation, colorful graphics, and cutscenes that look amazing are just some of the things I love about the visuals.
+ The atmospheric music really adds to the gameplay experience.
+ There is a lot of variety in the missions, especially considering the rather simple premise.
+ Even though it made some parts of the game far more annoying than they needed to be, the sanity meter was a neat addition. 

Cons:
- There is no simple arcade-style mode for those looking for a more retro experience.
- Difficulty is all over the place, and playing on anything above Normal feels near impossible.
- Fuel consumption feels completely unbalanced, especially when factoring in equipped ship abilities.
- Though I did enjoy the sanity meter, having to sideline your pilots so they can recover was rather annoying.
- The permadeath found in the hardest difficulty just seems cruel.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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He is very high on his own supply.