Thank you Atari for sending us this game to review!

The 1979 Arcade release of Lunar Lander is one of Atari's more historically significant games, and quite remarkable with how different it is from a lot of other classics of the time. Instead of being all about high-speed action, in Lunar Lander, if you went fast, you probably crashed and died. It was all about using Newtonian physics to carefully land your lander in the designated spots to earn points. If you missed the spot, or if you didn't land it perfectly, you would crash; according to one of the failure quotes I noticed while playing at an actual arcade not so long ago, it costs the taxpayers a cool 100 million.

Lunar Lander Beyond is a modern take, or expansion upon, the classic game. Rather than just a refresh of those ideas and simple mechanics, like Atari's Recharged line of games, it's instead an entirely new modern game with story, a cast of characters, and a progression system while borrowing obvious inspiration from Lunar Lander.

You take the role of a new captain of a Pegasus Corporation lander team. When you start, the early missions are basically glorified tutorials, as you learn the basics of game mechanics, like how to fly your lander, how to go through objective points, how to land, and so on. Early on, you will start by working through rescue missions, and picking up survivors. Much of the time, those survivors are just nameless people, but sometimes they are new crew members or even lander pilots. Crew members can show up in cut scenes or be advisors on how to tackle missions. Over time, that crew will grow in size and cast of characters. One of the first ones you pick up is Ms. Sandoz, a former lander pilot who had a long career before she got placed on medical disability. The idea of former lander pilots being trainers is neat, and happens several times throughout the story, but unfortunately, there does not seem to be any tangible benefits (like stat boosts) outside of their presence in cut scenes. It would be neat if pilots could gain some passive experience from being trained off-screen.

You start with a lander pilot, but over time rescue more. At first, it may seem best to just stick with one pilot. There is some benefit to this approach, since whichever pilot completes a mission gains experience points. When they level up, they gain a seemingly random trait that makes them more effective. Some example effects can be automatic self healing, saving fuel, and more. One that totally transformed one of my characters is one called 'Fast & Furious', that greatly increases acceleration and top speed. Suffice it to say, that character is used for any level where speed is of the essence.

However, my dream of sticking with a single pilot was shot down for a few reasons. For one, the experience required to gain levels really goes up a lot over time, so new traits take longer and longer to unlock. And while you can reroll traits by spending credits, it is quite expensive to do so, making it something you can only do on rare occasion. On top of all of that though, the main reason you can't stick with only one pilot has nothing to do with experience points, or traits. This reason is a mechanic introduced partway into the game: Stress.

The Stress system is something I have a love/hate relationship with. On the one hand, no one would ever switch out their pilots without it (well, except on Insane difficulty, which enables permadeath). On the other, having to live without my favorite pilots while they undergo psychiatric treatment to heal their high Stress levels means some missions can be tougher than I'd prefer. Despite not liking it while playing, I do think it encourages better play and is a net positive for the game.

You see, every time you collide with something, are hit by a shot, or make any other mistakes, your Stress increases. Since there are several ways to manage health, including via pickups and healing traits, it's important that Stress has be a separate level to manage rather than just using health alone. Once the Stress starts to climb, your pilot begins to succumb to space madness. Strange eyeballs, tongues, and other oddities start to appear on screen. The radar also gets fuzzy, and the colors on the screen start to separate. It's really trippy and looks honestly pretty awesome. Once you max out your Stress, you enter Insanity. In that mode, you are told that you have to seek out the Red Pill to exit from your Insane state. If you can't, you'll likely get trapped and destroyed by floating pink elephants (yes really). It's a cool mechanic, even if I hate getting killed by it.

When a pilot dies on most difficulties, you respawn either at the beginning of the level or the latest checkpoint. On some missions, planning when to grab those orange checkpoint icons can be really important, because if you missed something important and die, you have to go through that difficult trap again until you either complete the level, or find the next checkpoint. Checkpoints are separate from mission objectives, which each level also has. Objectives can vary greatly, but thankfully you can always see which one is next in the corner of your screen, or see all of them when you pause the game.

The main format of the game is that you have pilot and ship management screens after you choose a save to load or continue (unless you just started a new game), after which you choose your next mission. You generally just go from one to the next; I do not believe you can skip missions, though you can replay old missions at any time if you like. This can be a good way to level up pilots, earn credits, or get new high scores on a level, which is tracked. If you do well enough, you can earn a Bronze, Silver, or Gold on a level.

Once you choose your mission, you then watch a skippable cut scene, which is presented in a cartoon-like animation form. Everything is English voice acted, and it's excellent; the voice actors did a great job. Each character has a distinctive voice and personality that comes through really well. Even the ship's AI computer is fully voiced. Once you enter a mission, you control the lander, and it's presented in a 2D side view, where the ground (if applicable) is on the bottom of the screen.

Being a Lunar Lander title, you're going to pilot landers. You start with a simple one that most closely resembles the offering from the original game. It has a medium speed, has a lot of momentum and is tricky to control, but each lander type has abilities you can equip on them, and this one offers ways to attract pickups to you, which is really neat. The other ships all control differently, with one far and away being the easiest. I don't want to spoil the ships too much, as the variety is much of what makes the game fun, but let's just say that one of them is so good that it feels like cheating to use it - so I used it a lot.

Each of the landers has three mappable skills, which map to three of the face buttons on your controller. While keyboard play is possible and does work, the game strongly recommends a game controller, and I agree with that. You typically start with one or even no skills, but as you play you can collect chips, which lead to new lander skills. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the game supports analog trigger input for the main thrusters; rather the thrusters are fully on or off, and you just use momentum to manage how fast you go. So, you might pulse your thruster button to stay slow, rather than pull the trigger only partway. It would be great if this was added in, because true analog controls could help a lot here, though I suppose this means Nintendo Switch players aren't disadvantaged in any way, since the console lacks analog triggers on a hardware level.

From a technical standpoint, I find that the game runs pretty well on most hardware, including the Steam Deck. Strangely enough, I've seen the intro video stutter on some weaker systems like the Deck, but the game plays just fine. It probably helps that the art style reminds me of modern cartoons, with a straightforward, high contrast style, which keeps the polygon count under control. Cut scenes look more 2D and are even more cartoony than while flying your lander, with a focus on the characters rather than the lander and environment. At first, I really didn't like the style, especially in the cut scenes; the style in the action segments never bothered me at all. Thankfully, I warmed up to the art style over time. It may not be to everyone's liking, but it's not a dealbreaker to me for an otherwise decent game.

Morally, Lunar Lander Beyond has a few issues. If it wasn't clear already, your lander is at risk of exploding throughout, and asteroids, missiles, blaster shots, and more try to take you out. You also find rare and powerful items in your travels, and some of those already have people who owned them first. Whether it's outright theft is someone up for debate (Is a family member borrowing something theft? What about finding valuable treasure?), but your presence is often not welcome when you arrive. From the language point of view, I noticed 'b*st*rd' and '*ss' used quite rarely. Alcohol and drug use is alluded to, with a doctor being disappointed that he had to use some of the drugs he had on a patient, rather than for other reasons. Of course you can pick up red and blue pills to lower Stress in a level, but I'm not sure if that's a moral issue.

Lunar Lander Beyond is one of those decent and fun games that, while enjoyable, isn't exceptional. Not everything must be amazing, though. For a game trying to revitalize a classic property in a modern way, it does that pretty well. It certainly has moments that are quite frustrating, as well as a few difficulty spikes around the middle of the game. The controls are a mixed bag, but I suppose the original Lunar Lander wasn't a walk in the part either; mastering the controls was half of the fun and challenge there. I feel like the game deserves more success than it's currently had (based on current Steam review count), and I attribute that to a price that's a bit on the higher side. It's not a terrible value, as it took me around ten hours to complete. I would say it's worth a purchase on discount, though.