Recently I had the chance to play the first few hours of Sixth Hammer’s upcoming action platformer come UFO sim Moo Lander.
Moo Lander puts players in the plush interior of The Lander, an ancient civilisation’s last chance of survival, on a quest to find a source of milk that is used to power everything in their civilisation but has nearly run dry. It is your job to search for a mythical device that is said to create an infinite amount of milk.
Moo Lander is stunning. You can tell a lot of care and effort has been put into its beautiful hand crated visuals. In particular, the game’s use of colour, which sees vibrant greens and reds seen in its pastoral opening, give way to murky greys and blues as the Lander plunges deep into the earth on his hunt for a precious source of semi-skimmed.
This is accompanied by a fitting soundtrack, which could best be described as serene. I could happily listen to its calming melodies for hours on repeat.
Controlling the lander is fairly straightforward, and uses standard mouse and keyboard controls. This works well when traversing more open environments, but while navigating the game’s myriad of tight tunnels you often bump into the sides. Thankfully you don’t take damage from crashing, however, you do take damage from the fleshy piles attached to most tunnel walls.
Like most Metroidvanias in Moo Lander, you spend most of your time solving puzzles to unlock doors, while unlocking upgrades for your ship. in a nice twist though you also need to balance your resources to keep your craft in the sky. Everything from your shields to weapons requires milk to function, therefore you need to keep an eye on your supplies while hunting your next big score of the white stuff.
Initially, the lander is pretty much defenceless, that is until you find a set of blasters, to help defend yourself. However, once you find the sword combat became way too easy. The sword attacks in a huge 360-degree arch so you can easily twat every enemy in sight and uses very little milk. Even if you do feel a little OP at times, combat is still a lot of fun, and learning the diverse selection of enemy types help to keep you on your toes.
Each section ends with a boss fight against a different cow. I enjoyed the boss fights because it wasn’t just me versus the boss, there were other enemies too which helped to ramp up the tension and keep the action high. One problem I had with the boss fight in the demo was that in order to end the fight you have to capture the cow by using non-lethal electro bombs on them. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong! The cow has a special attack that sends the bombs flying away from them. This would be fine if it was a once in a while thing, but it spammed the damn attack to an infuriating degree, in a manner which just seems to artificially extend the fight.
I would highly recommend checking out the Moo Lander demo on stream. I’m looking forward to exploring more of this beautiful, and alien world when Moolander Launches on PC and consoles next year.
