Lunar Lander Beyond (PS5)
Lunar Lander Beyond is part of a broader effort by Atari to see their old classics reinvented into more modern forms, but Lunar Lander is a bit of an odd choice for it. Lunar Lander’s incredibly touchy and difficult goal of landing safely on the moon isn’t a particularly enjoyable one. It feels like a vital part of its historical context is that it’s an arcade game that frustrates most players until someone who practiced enough steps in and shows off their mastery to earn some admiration. For a game you play alone in your home, Lunar Lander Beyond would need to think of how to reinvigorate the idea, but while it layers on plenty of new mechanics to try and make it into something more varied and interesting, it is unfortunately shackled to the game it’s meant to evolve, afraid to throw away that past to its own detriment.
Lunar Lander Beyond begins with an animated cutscene that shows off that this game is going to involve much more than just trying to land safely on the moon, this tale taking you across the solar system in a far future where mankind is found more on other planets and moons than their home world. You are the captain of the PSS Beckett, a spaceship that serves under the Pegasus corporation. This powerful business has its fingers in much of the advanced technology that keeps this interplanetary society together, but that crushing control is initially portrayed with some amusingly dark humor. Your ship AI HARA’s dry delivery about necessities like air and water being luxuries and how people in your position rarely survive long puts into perspective the kind of company you work for well before characters like the rebellious Veronina join your crew. When the game begins, most of your work is just successfully performing landing missions either for Pegasus or as a surreptitious way to earn some cash since your work is deliberately designed to be unprofitable for you otherwise, but when a cosmic event causes the solar system to be riddled with small scale black holes, you and a gradually building cast of fairly likeable characters shift instead to trying to rescue people and figure out how this strange event occurred so you can fix things.
While the animated cutscenes can be a bit stiff and the fully voiced characters can sometimes be a little too technical that your eyes might glaze over as they speak, the set-up for this sci-fi adventure is sound and even gives you good reason to head from populated cities on Mars to the mines of Venus with their acid rain. However, since this is a Lunar Lander game, the focus of the gameplay is still most of all on guiding a small lander craft through dangerous areas where you could quite easily break apart if you impact something too roughly or mess up your landing. Your starting lander can be rotated in the air and ignite its thrusts to move forward or cushion its fall, and initially you’ll mostly be worming your way through caverns or around machinery with the focus on delicate movement taking front and center. Even when you are given a mission like beating a rich man’s zeppelin in a race, you have plenty of room to maneuver and it is fairly slow, meaning clearing it isn’t too much of a fuss but it still involves understanding the handling of your lander. As the adventure progresses though and things like timed missions, turrets, chase sequences, overly tight fits, and more start to really strain the feasibility of moving your lander around safely, it then starts to layer on new considerations to make things even harder.
In Lunar Lander Beyond, you aren’t the one going down in the landers. Instead, you have a team of pilots, some of these provided and others available for rescue within the game’s 30 available missions often as a bonus objective. Lunar Lander Beyond does have a range of difficulties in place to help you find the one you prefer, Normal mode for instance having mid-level checkpoints and restarts without penalties, but while that might alleviate some of your frustrations, that frustration instead falls on your pilots. Your pilots will have their Stress build up any time they make even the smallest contact with something, and if they get too stressed, they start hallucinating dangers like giant eyes and mouths that will harm them to touch. If they get incredibly stressed, the screen will turn red and pink elephants come in to cause even more trouble, the player needing to snag a red pill to reduce the stress a touch, but oftentimes they’ll still be hallucinating somewhat and you can quite easily get back to that rough state again within the same level. The fiddly controls come with intense punishment for slip ups as a result, and what’s worse, if you do want to permanently reduce their stress so a pilot’s not constantly hallucinating on a mission, you either need to spend an exorbitant amount of credits on an instant cure that you probably can’t afford until you start nearing the game’s end or you send them to free therapy that makes them unusable for four missions. If you choose to play the game on an even higher difficulty though, you can even find that pilots can permanently die on your missions, brutal difficulty clearly part of the game’s DNA but funnily enough, there are ways to completely ignore almost all of the game’s most annoying mechanics.
Pilots can have unique traits, these essentially being determined by luck of the draw as you find new ones or level them up across missions, but while some of these can be helpful like burning through fuel more slowly or being able to build up speed better than other pilots, the real winning trait you’ll want is the inability to build up stress. Immediately a nuisance mechanic is wiped away if you get a pilot with this on your team, and you can also eliminate the touchy lander controls as soon as you unlock the Dragonfly. This bug-like lander isn’t controlled through careful use of thrusters, instead you just use your control stick and point in the direction you want to go and you’ll fly in that direction. You still need to pull off soft landings and adjust properly to get around danger, but it is far smoother to use the Dragonfly and in fact, it almost makes the game a bit too easy. Most levels in Lunar Lander Beyond already are designed to take only a few minutes, there being gold medal rewards for completing levels within a certain time and with a certain amount of health and you’ll often see the game expects between 3 to 5 minutes to achieve them. With the Dragonfly you can often get pretty close to those par times on your first attempt, and what’s more, the levels are clearly designed for the other landers to conceivably maneuver around in them, so removing the fiddly thruster management in favor of free movement means obstacles often lack the intended punch since you zip right past.
Lunar Lander Beyond continues to layer on difficulty alleviation with the abilities you can unlock for landers. Stabilizers will instantly bring your ship to a halt just with a high fuel cost to compensate, but since most levels end when you pull off a final landing, you can often use the stabilizer to make that easy. Shields can also be activated to invalidate any damage from an attack or collision, although with the right pilot or in the right situation you can sometimes do things like see a bunch of electrical barriers ahead you are meant to time your flight through and instead just activate the shields and fly through since the fuel cost won’t be that great. So much of Lunar Lander Beyond feels oddly trapped between the game providing you so many tools to make it too easy yet the alternative is having an aggravating time trying to make the normal touchy lander controls work. The game tries to invent a range of objectives and situations for you to navigate, but it feels like you’re being asked to choose between deliberate frustration or a breezy flight, neither providing enough meat since advanced objectives often have to be built around rudimentary controls to keep the game broadly possible to beat even by people who have some stubborn point to prove going with the worse lunar lander.
THE VERDICT: Despite providing a range of unique levels and goals across the solar system, Lunar Lander Beyond can’t properly build a game around them because it is caught between two extremes. The permissiveness of the Dragonfly and a pilot who is stress free makes the game manageable but far too easy, but sticking with the more demanding landers and pilots who get stressed out too easily just leads to a lot of suffering and aggravation as you try to force them to work. Lunar Lander Beyond tries to preserve the touchy controls of its predecessor but they rub up against the limits of what it allows you to do expediently, something that makes attempting a stage with the Dragonfly feel too manageable as a result. Ultimately, even Lunar Lander Beyond’s artistic efforts can’t help its efforts to expand on the original as it still ends up trapped by its past.
And so, I give Lunar Lander Beyond for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. I’m not going to fault the game for the Dragonfly, for the stress free pilot trait, or the shield being too effective of an upgrade, because they are actually what keeps this game from being a grueling push through levels that test your patience with the flight controls the original arcade game was known for. You could potentially only use one of these options if you want it to be a bit rougher, but it does feel like Lunar Lander Beyond sets up a lot of obstacles purely to be nuisances, the stress mechanic in particular feeling like a cruel cherry on top if you do try and do a run without any of the accommodating features. The Dragonfly at least means you get to see some of the more interesting ideas and the game isn’t a complete pushover once you’re in it, but you definitely notice that stages struggle more to challenge it compared to if your controls were just rough to manage and your pilot was frequently on the brink of going insane. Lunar Lander Beyond is saddled by its attempt to incorporate familiar elements from the original, but the Dragonfly almost feels like it’s a step in the right direction. Its flight controls are intuitive and responsive, but incorporate momentum more and remove the stabilizer and perhaps you can have something that flies well but still has its moments where you need to wrangle it to avoid disaster. This potential middle ground lander could afford to have more aggressive dangers to add in some of the difficulty otherwise lost, and the stress mechanic can perhaps just be another piece of the masochistic high difficulties if it isn’t thrown out entirely.
On an original Lunar Lander arcade cabinet, learning the controls and pulling off those difficult landings was meant to be a bit of a badge of honor. Here, utilizing the rough lander controls and engaging with mechanics like stress just makes it look like you’re making things needlessly harder for yourself for little reward. There’s a nugget of something decent in Lunar Lander Beyond as it concocts a good variety of situations and levels, but no mode of play feels like they truly get the most out of them because the player will either have too easy or too tough of a time engaging with it. In the same year Lunar Lander Beyond released, Yars’ Revenge saw a much more drastic reinvention with Yars Rising, and perhaps that would have been the way to go with Lunar Lander Beyond. Rather than clinging to the past, imagine what the game could be, and while we see some of that in the game we got, Lunar Lander Beyond is still too busy paying homage to the arcade original to allow itself to be the sci-fi adventure it could have been.