Outside of a chicken sandwich chain, if you put cows in your product, I’m game. Moo Lander from developers The Sixth Hammer is an addictive shooter with RPG elements (go figure), where you play as an alien on the hunt for…cows. The concept is out there, as is the mixture between puzzle, shooter, and RPG, but much like putting ice in milk, it’s a great combination.
Let’s milk this review.
Story and Gameplay
As stated above, Moo Lander is a game where you play as an alien that crash lands their ship on earth (futuristic, human-less earth). Able to retain most of the ship parts and get their UFO back in the air, the alien’s mission is simple…locate cows that will provide milk for your dying planet. The narrative isn’t too hard to follow, it’s just an odd bird three-act structure. It is out there a little bit, but it works due to its creativity, even if it does struggle with humor at times. If you go into it knowing that your story is about alien abducting cows to save a race of beings, then you’ll forgive any serious opinion of shoddy humor. It’s just silly humor, but well-placed.
How does a story like this translate to gameplay design? Remarkably well. On your hunt for udderly unique cows, the gameplay uses the journey to throw puzzles and enemies at the player in a side-scrolling shooter style. It works because of the middle-of-the-road puzzles, which require you to figure out how to use enemies and environments to traverse through barriers and baddies. For example, some plants spit poisonous beans at you. Should you get hit, you will suffer damage, but if you avoid such beans and let them fall to the ground, they will create new vicious vegetation. The beans can destroy thorny plants blocking routes, which means you can lead a series of sprouting bean-spitting plants to thorned vines and have them destroy the blockade. There are quite a few enemies and frienemies that work this way in the game that help you come up with solutions to progression problems. They’re easy and not-to-frustrating solutions, which makes for a steady pace of progress in the game.
Those same beans can also work together with your ship’s weapons. For example, you have a milk shield early in the game, which can deflect those beans into other enemies, such as thorny vines. What this gives you is multiple solutions to perplexing puzzle problems. It also gives a sense of confidence to the player that the game wants you to win and having several solutions at your disposal for a single problem is comforting. Now, the puzzles are more than just thorny vines. Sometimes the puzzles are simple ship maneuvering solutions that get you through tight spots to reach a solution. Sometimes the puzzles are balancing rocks to open large stone doors to progress to the next step. Other times, there are solutions to puzzles that require you to have speedy reflexes to get through fast enemies that hinder your progression. Whatever the case might be, the puzzles and solutions come in a variety of flavors that keep the gameplay interesting. For a game that is a side-scrolling shooter at its core, the design offers up a lot of different puzzles that mix the core gameplay elements of a shooter with a strategy-driven secondary core design. If this game was a juggler, it would be juggling chainsaws and bowling balls and doing a good job of it.
If that wasn’t enough to keep you interested and engaged, there are RPG elements in the gameplay design. As you destroy enemies and take out cow bosses, which are unique and fun to see in motion, you gain XP and other goodies. The XP levels up the strength of your ship including your health, and a variety of other odds and ends. The goodies you receive are side hustles that provide you with added motivation to keep playing the game. For example, you can earn camo for the game as you start to meet goals and defeat a certain amount of each enemy. You can take on enemy form once those goals are met. Is it valuable in the long run? Probably not, but it’s a nice additional goody for those completionist gamers out there in the world. Anyway, the upgrades to your ship make for motivation to keep going in the game, even when enemies sometimes repeat. And that might be the biggest issue with the game is how much repetition happens on the enemy side. It’s not a dealbreaker by any means, but you do get a lot of repeating common enemies, even when they expand in size. The bosses in the game are fun and unique enough to make you forget that at times. There are so many cool alien cow designs. I don’t want to spoil them for you, but I could not have imagined this many different cows.
As for other odds and ends with gameplay design, one of the nicest features in the game is the variety of different weapons and defenses that your ship can earn as you progress. You start simple with gigantic bombs to drop on beings, then move to milk shield, and then to additional offensive powers. The rest kind of falls in line with the progression in the game, where you earn items that you need for sections of gameplay. Those sections act as mini-tutorials for those weapons/defense, and the game allows you later to use them as you see fit. It’s a flexible game in terms of what weapons you can use and when. It’s not rigid, which harkens back to earlier review comments about different solutions for problems. For a game that should have been linear in design with weapons and puzzles, it’s incredibly non-linear with solutions. That’s a huge plus for Moo Lander.
One amazing aspect of this game is how it never feels overwhelming. It’s just a steady progression and its loosey-goosey nature is pleasant from beginning to end. I like when a game doesn’t feel like it’s trying to take you down or make you grind like a fiend. Moo Lander, much like its story and humor, seems to want you to sit back and enjoy the ride. I can dig that vibe with a game.
Are there any faults in this game’s stars? The game doesn’t have a lot to criticize beyond enemy variety, and even that seems whiney when you look at the entire package. There is repetition in the game with enemies. While the common enemies are creative, looking at your Kamikaze bugs, they do tend to show up repeatedly. There isn’t a tremendous amount of challenge once you have enemy patterns in mind. For example, there are worms that grow from trees and the only way to kill them is by eliminating a pair of buds on each side of the worm. You must be conscious of the worm growing, even when you destroy it in pieces, while also focusing on the buds. By eliminating the buds, you eliminate the worm. There are a lot of these worms and figuring out that you can fire from afar to avoid the worm attacks while hitting the buds works 10 out of 10 times. Even when bigger versions of this enemy appear. A variety of enemies with multiple solutions would have made this game near perfect, but it’s decent in this area and good overall.
Conclusion
Moo Lander is a fun game that can be played in short stints. It has a whacky and creative story that supports a side-scrolling shooter/puzzle/RPG backbone. It does more right than not and makes for an engaging and entertaining journey to hunt down alien cows.
