Lunar Lander Beyond

My impressions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDOYpYf-mas At first, I thought this was going to be the next entry in (New) Atari's Recharged series of retro remakes, but it's definitely not that. It's a whole new Lunar Lander game that takes the ideas of the viciously hard 1979 arcade classic and turns it into a full new game with a campaign and all. I enjoyed my time with it, but like my typical Lunar Lander skills, this is very uneven. For starters, play on at least the Hard difficulty as it's a cakewalk on anything less than that. The story consists of a Joss Whedon-esque kind of plot where you're working for a heartless space corporation, doing one of their most dangerous jobs. The game doesn't take itself seriously at all and it's sarcastic humour is done reasonably well. Shortly after starting, a big event happens that threatens the galaxy and it'll be up to you and a gang of characters you find along the way to right things, using your lunar landing ways. The characters are all voice acted and aside from them obviously not recording at the same time, the dialogue is decent enough. There's also a comic book illustration visual style in both the game play and the handful of cutscenes that I like quite a bit. Each mission involves completing various objectives and landing safely, while optionally picking up additional currency, pilots and upgrades that you can customize your ships with. You'll start with only one ship and will unlock three others by the end of the campaign. Your pilots have various different skills that can be leveled up by completing missions (you can grind previous missions for better medals and more experience) and in addition, there's a neat stress mechanic that was likely lifted from [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1562430/DREDGE/]Dredge[/url] where as you make mistakes, your pilots will get more stressed, which will cause the environment to change and at high levels, cause the game to play tricks on you, to the point where your pilots can go insane. Unfortunately, the game's balance issues (especially at lower difficulties) rear their heads quickly. The only thing the currency is used for is expediting treating pilot stress to clear it faster. Ship upgrades are all found and equipped for free and new ships are given as part of campaign progression. As you can treat a pilot for free by making them unavailable for 4 missions and use other pilots, it's trivially easy to clear the game without spending a dime. Certain ships are also objectively far better than others, being more nimble maneuverable and making all but a handful of missions much easier, even if trying to go for gold on all of them. There's also no penalty for failing missions unless you're on at least Hard difficulty. It's perplexing because they developed all these cool systems and mechanics that fit really well with a Lunar Lander style game, then render all of them effectively moot unless you either really amp up the difficulty or purposefully try to limit yourself with them. On Normal, the campaign will probably take you 4-5 hours, unless you want to find every pilot and get Gold on every level. There's no multiplayer or other challenge modes beyond that. I still actually enjoyed Lunar Lander Beyond a fair amount, but I can't recommend it outside of a sale. A lot of New Atari's recent releases haven't done well on Steam (going by the number of reviews on most of them) and this isn't because of lacking quality, but because most are priced way too high in my opinion. If you like physics based titles like this, I think waiting for a better price will yield you a good time.

Garbage. Controls feel like absolute crap, and for a game that's all about controls, this misses the mark by 1000000 miles. NO ANALOG THRUST. You pull the trigger, it eventually fires but fires FULL almost immediately so you have zero control. Absolutely pointless garbage.

Puh, this review is hard. I try to enjoy the game but there are so many things that stand in it's way. - The videos really are all stuttering in image and audio, they look nice and would have a great atmospheric music, but there is no way to enjoy them. I'm afraid to skip them in case there is something story relevant, so I sit through them and really dislike it. - The default landers flight experience is nice! This is one of the two reasons I wanted to get this game - I love to "carefully" and slowly maneuver a lander with this kind of controls. BUT I'm really slow doing it and then suddenly a lot of missions are on sort of a timer, where you have to quickly destroy asteroids or flee from rising lava. I could not enjoy it at all. Then out of a sudden you get an alternative vehicle that has an alternative control mode: it directly fies in the direction you press. Every mission is so much easier with it and you can pick it for every mission. This makes it really hard to use the vehicle I enjoy flying - I try to force myself, but when a mission is on a timer I have to restart with the other vehicle, that I don't enjoy. I can't understand the reasoning behind this design decision. "Players will optimize the fun out of a game" is a quote that fit's here I think, because you also get a bonus when you finish quickly, which is so easy with the other vehicle. - The second reason for my purchasing the game is because I wanted n interesting story surrounding the missions. It seems this way at first, and sometimes the characters speak about interesting decisions like "We could save a lot of people on this planet - or the other planet could have minerals and equipment but there are just some mines" - then I think I can do an interesting decision, but the story continues just with "So it's clear what we should do" and I can just pick "start mission" without any decision. This lead me to skip most of the dialogue after some time because it doesn't contribute to anything. - There are some other problems like environmental hazards have no good indicator about the area they effect - some explosions sometimes hit but sometimes don't even though I interpreted their graphic the other way. You can't use the map to know where you have to go in most cases, you can't see a lot and not even move the camera a bit with the control stick, it's always centered. You only know your way because there are money-items placed in a "perfect" line you just have to follow. So each map doesn't even invite you to explore. In almost every mission you just follow the line of items until you are done - which makes everything feel the same. It's to hard to review - I could really love the game, but it stands in it's own way. As it is now I mostly lost motivation to continue. I got it on a sale for 30% off - I think for it's full price it's a bit too much asking considering all the problems.

Lunar Lander Beyond released on April 23rd 2024 developed by Dreams Uncorporated and Published by Atari is more less a re-imagined game to the likes of Atari's original Lunar Lander, which in its own right was a tough game, if no somewhat slow and somewhat challenging controls, at least in my humble opinion, but compared to this game, that game looks like a cake-walk. In LLB you are a captain of a vessel (via an IMO a poorly configured X-Box controller) and boy even trying to get the finesse of the this game is more or less pure frustration and pretty much unplayable, and for a game that Atari thinks they can charge $29.99 for is ridiculous, the graphics of the game are pretty much on point for what I have observed with the re-vamped games, but again, the game is suffering from controls and poor gravity (for lack of a better term) which I know the game is suppose to have some challenge to it, but yikes, in its present configuration, is just pretty much no fun for the average player, let alone and Arcader. Again, this game may sell well at $15 dollars at most, and maybe some true fans will play it through, but personally for my dollar going forward, I may not buy these games from Atari. I am sorry to post a review like this, but its just not that good guys, I recommend staying away until the price is better and more importantly they dial in the physics and controls, this ship is a total flying brick at its best at this point :(

Amazing on Steam Deck

Finished the game, The gameplay is the strong point, and it does a great goob at keeping things fresh by goving you three different ways to play the game with the ships. You can really fill yourself fighting against the gravity with the first one, a master with the second and a junkie with the third. The story is meh, and the second ship trivializes the rest of the game, the missions where you cant use it are the best. If you want a fun quick game this is it.

A quick verdict after finishing the campaign: Lunar Lander Beyond tries hard to bring the simple idea of Atari's original game into the present. It expands on the main premise with additonal gameplay mechanics, different lander types with different controls and individual upgrades, a pilot sanity system (that wants to infuse some strategy into your pilot choices) and a main story. While there are good intentions and a couple of things to love here, overall the game is held back massively by its story. Those endless briefings of exposition dumps feel like a chore to grind through. Alongside the often relatively short missions these extensive dialogue segments take up way too much time (and space) and aren't really that interesting, except for maybe the final chapter. As for the game itself, on normal difficulty the economy and pilot healing systems don't really come into effect and to be fair, you can either chose between landers that are more or less difficult to control or a lander that's so precise, it almost feels like cheesing the game. Lunar Lander Beyond aims for the heart, but lacks balancing and soul. It never really develops a steady flow. Some of the missions are pretty boring, too. I played through the campaign and besides occasional fun moments, unfortunately it wasn't an engaging enough experience to me for a recommendation. However retro fans might consider Lunar Lander Beyond, when its on sale. It's not horrible, just very, very middle of the road!

How could they screw the controls up so bad? It really looks like this game has been made by an unexperienced team. I wonder if they had actually played the original Atari titles. Thrust control is NOT analogic, which makes the games pointlessly difficult. Atari shouldn't have approved this mess.

This game seems like it might be fun. I've played the tutorial missions. I kind of agree that the controls leave something to be desired, but I don't think that detracts too much from the overall game. They rely too much on the "stabilize" ability to deal with the somewhat imprecise controls. My real complaint with the game though is weird choppy audio issues during the cutscenes. The first few seconds of helicopter noise mask this, but the rest of the opening cutscene is a choppy mess on my Steam Deck. I tried Proton Experimental, and that didn't help. This isn't an issue on my main workstation.

€28,99 before discount?! That's CRAZY MADNESS! Also the reason why only 12(!) reviews are made so far. Greedy Atari, take this - a DOWNVOTE - for free!