Lunar Lander Beyond review – fly me to the Moon-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Lunar Lander Beyond – a new take on a very old game (Picture: Atari)

The latest Atari reboot tries to reimagine the ancient Lunar Lander as a modern, narrative led game about dystopian space corporations.

As we’ve said before, we really don’t envy Atari trying to update its classic games from the golden era of gaming. So many of the oldest arcade and Atari 2600 titles are so decrepitly ancient that, while not necessarily unplayable, it is very difficult to eek any entertainment out of them – no matter how historically important they might be. Nobody tries to remake The Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat Station or A Trip To The Moon and yet that’s the equivalent of what Atari is trying to do here.

The original Lunar Lander was released as a coin-op in 1979 but despite what you might imagine was not an original title. It came from a long line of similar games, including 1973’s Moonlander and a text-based incarnations of the same idea, which was available in schools and universities in 1969 – the same year as the actual Moon landings.

All of which proves that copying other successful games, and tying into pop culture events, is as old as gaming itself. All of which is fascinating but seeing as the gameplay for Lunar Lander consists of nothing more than controlling the Moon lander craft, by rotating it and firing the thruster, it leaves very little to work with. But to the developer’s credit they’ve done the best they can.

As one of the first widely successful commerical video games, Lunar Lander’s influence is immense without ever getting into any specifics. For Atari though it helped inspire the even more popular Asteroids, while the idea of controlling a spaceship falling under gravity, using a limited supply of fuel, also led to the conceptually more similar Gravitar, a few years after that. (British gamers are likely to be more familiar with clones such as Thrust or Oids.)

We guess Gravitar isn’t going to get its own reboot because Lunar Lander Beyond takes a lot of inspiration from it, in terms of the more complex level layout, although the basic gameplay is still almost exactly the same as in 1979.

What makes Atari’s attempts to revive its various franchises interesting is that it keeps using a variety of interesting indie developers, with WayForward currently making a new Yars’ Revenge game and this being the work of Colombian developer Dreams Uncorporated, who worked on 2021 role-player Cris Tales.

Apparently, it was their idea to keep the gameplay largely the same, while also creating a complex story element to explain what’s going on.

There are lengthy cut scenes before and after each mission, featuring a typically evil sci-fi corporation but also trying to humanise the various characters, from the secretive executive to a would-be communist revolutionary. Some sequences are animated but most of the time you’re just listening to the dialogue in the cockpit of your carrier, which can drag on.

Although the script is often funny, with the fact that pilots have a very short life expectancy being openly acknowledged, the story elements don’t really justify the amount of time and energy that are expended on them. They’re fine but their length and frequency overwhelms the rest of the game, whose simple charms seem a poor match for such narrative excesses.

The ship you start with controls almost exactly like the original Lunar Lander, as you gently thrust to change direction and move forward, rather than just managing your descent to the surface. As well as collecting crystals you often also have to rescue civilians, collect more fuel, and contend with other unique dangers, such as rising lava or deflecting incoming comets.

You’ve also got to worry about getting overly stressed – not personally, although that will happen, but your in-game pilot. Hit the walls too many times and you’ll not only damage the ship but also become increasingly stressed, until you’re seeing pink elephants and psychedelic hallucinations.

Lunar Lander Beyond – the pink elephants aren’t real (Picture: Atari)

There’s a roster of different pilots to manage (that you can run out of on the highest difficulty) and so it’s sensible to rotate them in and out of service, sending them to a psychiatrist if necessary or… giving them drugs and telling them to get back out there. Each pilot starts with a random set of traits, such as using less fuel or collecting more crystals, and more of these can be unlocked by levelling them up.

Eventually, you also get access to new ships, which generally control in a more traditional video game manner. Although you can also use items like shields or a stabiliser, which is essentially a brake, to improve even the starter craft.

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Trying to make a modern version of Lunar Lander seems like madness but if you had to do it this is certainly an interesting direction. The story elements don’t really gel though and while the gameplay is more complex than the original, we couldn’t help but wish it was more like Oids, with combat and more direct action.

That’s not what Lunar Lander was though and while you could argue that’s why this should never have been attempted in the first place, we’re still glad it exists. Even as a failure, this is still more interesting than other more mundane games.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Dreams Uncorporated
Release Date: 23rd March 2024
Age Rating: 12

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