A game by The Sixth Hammer for PC, Switch, PS4, and Xbox One, originally released in 2022.
Moo Lander is an action-adventure centered around the trope of flying saucers abducting cows. You play as a guy named Lander (apparently) who has crash landed on planet rich in bovine resources, which is great because your entire civilization – and your spacecraft – all run on this delicious creamy substance (white gold, if you will). Unfortunately, you lost most of your important ship components in the crash, so part of your mission centers around finding them while battling your way through hostile environments and occasionally using non-lethal weapons to defeat cow bosses and beam them back home. The game also offers local 4P with survival and deathmatch modes.
Your ship can fly freely in any direction, and you can aim in any direction as well, although you start the game with no weapons or defenses. Early on, you lure exploding plants to blast stones and cause them to roll and break through objects and level hazards. Soon, you acquire a milk shield that you can aim to defend yourself from projectiles... and deflect them into enemies and hazards. Later you acquire a projectile weapon and a sword, as well as some non-lethal bombs for taking out cows.
You can equip one defensive item, one lethal weapon, and one non-lethal weapon at a time, and pause the game to cycle through them. Each piece of equipment is powered by milk, slowly draining a milk meter that can be refilled at “Mlikarizer” pads that continuously blast gooey gobs of milky white into the air. Similarly, there are health plants that can be used to restore health, although these must be manually activated by pressing down on them with your ship, causing them to expel green health-restoring orbs. These orbs are sometimes dropped by defeated enemies as well.
New equipment is unlocked by defeating enemies and building up XP, and there are loads of weapons and other items to unlock. You have milk bullets that fire as quickly as you can pull the trigger, a milk sword that swings continuously to cause heavy damage in a short range, and then there are milk arrows, grenades, lasers, missiles, a milk machine gun, and even milk shuriken. Once you’ve had a chance to get used to the basics of attacking and defending, you earn a dash maneuver that helps you avoid enemy attacks and hazards.
Some weapon unlocks require you to reach very high levels, ensuring that new armaments unlock throughout your adventure. You can also change the appearance of your ship by defeating specified numbers of each enemy type, with most of these changes being purely cosmetic, but some offer minor ability enhancements such as a slightly faster fire rate.
You are joined by your ship’s AI, named Hamilton, who occasionally makes comments about the world around you or points you in the direction of your next encounter. These exchanges offer a bit of flat humor in an otherwise colorful experience. By UFO standards, your ship is quite small… in fact, it’s about the size of a cow on this planet, so Lander and Hamilton are pretty excited about this world of milky possibilities.
You fly through colorful subterranean environments and along the surface in five themed environments, each of which is vibrant and colorful. Shafts of light penetrate from above, particles rise up from below, areas are overgrown with vines and dangerous thorn bushes, butterflies and other creatures move about, and the backgrounds are multi-layered, allowing you to see lots of details off in the distance and offering a sense of depth to the sidescrolling action.
Enemies are organic as well, with some of them wandering around, and some growing up out of the ground, and some can grow back after being destroyed. You’ll face projectile-spewing pitcher plants, exploding thorns, extending vines, and a number of animal creatures as well.
In addition to fending off the local flora and fauna, you must also solve a number of environmental puzzles, allowing you to break through barriers and open doors that block the way forward. Often you must also face enemies while moving between puzzle elements, and your life bar drains very quickly when touching hazards or getting caught in explosions, but checkpoints are frequent so very little gameplay must be repeated if you are killed.
Cows act as boss encounters – with more than 20 in all – offering multi-phase encounters that require you to use different weapon types against them, since you’re restricted to non-lethal measures in order to preserve their precious milk. Cows can attack with projectiles and push you back with waves that originate from their loud moos, and each cow boss uses different strategies. They can occasionally call in support creatures as well, which you are free to defeat with traditional weapons. Once you wear down these milk-filled monsters, you are free to beam them up and continue on with your mission… and perhaps discover the secrets of the cows and a legendary object that is said to produce an infinite supply of milk.
2D CRED
Moo Lander was developed by The Sixth Hammer, a studio based in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and founded by Dimitar Popov and Yasen Bagalev. Designs for the game began in 2013, originating as a concept for a mobile title, before eventually adding additional complexities that necessitated changes for a release on computers and consoles.
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