Terra Lander

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is also included in the Terra Trilogy bundle, along with Terra Lander II – Rockslide Rescue and Terra Bomber.)

Terra Lander is a 2-Stick Shooter released on PC in 2015, ported to PlayStation 4 in 2020, and then brought to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game is clearly inspired by the classic 1979 videogame Lunar Lander and basically asks the question “what if that, but with enemies to shoot?”

Given what it’s aiming for, Terra Lander absolutely nails the presentation, with simple line art graphics on a black background with a starry field that mirrors the classic game’s vector graphics. This game also makes use of some particle effects for explosions and to indicate the direction your lander is flying.This mostly looks great, but the amount of particles onscreen at a time can make it hard to tell what’s going on, and in particular this can obscure bullets shot by enemies, which can be frustrating. Accompanying the action is a digitized voice commending your performance or amusingly chiding your lack of knowledge of physics, with a soundtrack consisting of Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, which seems particularly fitting given this song’s use in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As for the gameplay, while I won’t go as far as to say Lunar Lander can’t be combined successfully with a Two-Stick Shooter, it isn’t done very successfully here. The ridiculous shooty action works against the realism the game’s physics are trying to convey, and those same physics make taking evasive action feel like pulling teeth. However, even beyond this, Terra Lander has a real issue with difficulty spikes, with the game ramping up that difficulty extremely quickly within the first half-dozen or so levels, with no sort of checkpoint system or anything.

In the end, I appreciate what Terra Lander is attempting to do, but the high difficulty and the clashing nature of its gameplay makes it hard to recommend. Unless you’re a fan of Two-Stick Shooters looking for a physics-based challenge, or a fan of the original Lunar Lander who always wanted to try that game out with tons of enemies to shoot, this game probably isn’t for you.

tl;dr – Terra Lander combines the physics-focused gameplay of the classic game Lunar Lander with 2-Stick Shooter elements. Unfortunately, these two gameplay elements don’t mix very well here, and even beyond that, this game has serious problems with difficulty spikes. Unless something about this game’s concept really appeals to you, you’re better off letting it drift off into space.

Grade: C-

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