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Lander

Windows - 1999

Year 1999
Platform Windows
Released in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
Genre Action, Simulation
Theme Flight, Licensed Title, Sci-Fi / Futuristic
Publisher Psygnosis Limited
Developer Psygnosis Limited
Perspective 3rd-Person
4.11 / 5 - 9 votes

Description of Lander

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Much in the style of Activision's Battlezone, Lander is effectively a 3d remake and 'expansion' of ancient vector-based arcade game of the same name (familiar, no?).

You take the role of a daredevil pilot out to make a fortune through a series of challenging missions in your trusty planetside lander craft, a small, lightweight, maneuverable machine designed for tight ground-level (or below-ground) maneuvering, controlled through a set of automatically handled maneuvering thrusters on the corners, and a single main engine on the belly of the ship. The rough plot of the game is fairly simple - you're a mercenary lander pilot for hire, on a trip around the solar system. As you stop at each planet, various companies offer you jobs - sometimes legal, most often not, to do while you're on your various stops.

With the money accrued from each successful sortie, you can upgrade (or even replace) your lander craft, buy better weapons, engines, armor and such. However, later in the story, you'll get a whole range of shady figures after you, strange conspiracies and alien technologies - all of which mean very little to the gameplay, but it keeps things interesting. The gameplay, for the most part, involves tunnel flying and subterranean navigation. This is both aided and made more difficult by your crafts unique control system - the mouse provides tilt, roll and vertical thrust, while the keyboard provides yaw, weapon, item and camera controls.

Combat is fairly simple - you just move the enemy into your target sights and press fire a few times until it blows up. Most of the action comes from navigating the treacherous and sometimes unpredictable terrain you'll be seeing in your adventure, rather than blasting at targets.

Psygnosis have done a great job with level design, with effects like rain, lightning and fog very effectively portrayed, and the various structures you're flying around feel very authentic - a mine complex feels like it should, filled with chunky automated machinery, rough rock surfaces, dangerous overhangs and such, whereas a heavily defended prison complex is a clean-cut, sleekly built piece of architecture. Enemy design is fairly basic and weak though, but as combat isn't really a core gameplay element, that doesn't matter too much. The physics engine is convincing, and things bounce, roll, spin and explode as you'd expect and wish, although sometimes your craft can become 'stuck' - this is usually solved by just bouncing and rolling randomly at the expense of some shield energy.

The graphics are also exemplary, allowing much detail tweaking, meaning that it will look okay on an old system, but amazing on a modern top of the range rig. As such, a 3d accelerator is required. However, this does make it one of the best looking games on all of HOTU. While the average review of Lander (at the time) was fairly negative, giving average marks at best, the scant few positive reviews were overwhelmingly so.

Why so much difference? Well, it all depends on how much effort you're willing to put in. Fire up Lander for a quick, arcade-y blast and you will be sorely disappointed, and probably find your twitchy little lander craft smeared across a nearby stony outcropping. The game is long and difficult, with a sometimes steep learning curve, but all obstacles can be overcome with some degree of persistence, and a lot of piloting skill.

In summary, this game is beautiful, highly playable, rewarding, challenging, not for the faint of heart, and almost totally unheard of. This, in my opinion doesn't just make it an underdog, but a definite Top Dog, and entrant in the Hall of Belated Fame. A highly recommended (if hefty) download. There are some minor technical issues - I don't believe it is compatible with windows XP systems, as well as some other things mentioned below, but if your system matches the specs, then get it!

Review By HOTUD

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Comments and reviews

Gigagamer74 2025-03-04 -1 point

My description of the game Lander.

We all love 2D physics-based arcade games – *World of Goo, Angry Birds, Gish, Elastomania, Osmos, Line Rider*, and other "physics" entertainments. Physics has brought depth, variability, and replayability to the world of 2D arcades. In full 3D, however, physics-based games haven't had the same success as in 2D. There are plenty of arcade racing games where physics is a key gameplay mechanic – *FlatOut 1/2/UC, Insane, Screamer Rally, Screamer 4x4*, and so on. Among them, *GTA 4* and *Driver* stand out, as their scale allowed players to indulge in physics-driven chaos for much longer and with greater intensity than usual. We are undoubtedly grateful to the developers of these two games for their courage – to include a realistic physics model in a Triple-A game, one must have truly "steel" nerves. They deserve all the praise for this.

But is that all? Were there no other physics-driven games in three-dimensional space apart from car-based ones? There were – and how! Unfortunately, due to various circumstances, not many people know about it.

In March 1999, Psygnosis gave a real gift to all physics-game enthusiasts – the release of the sci-fi Triple-A flight simulator *Lander*. A spacecraft, moving similarly to the Lunar Lander module, carries out military missions across different planets of the Solar System – sabotage, infiltration, artifact retrieval, and more.

For the first time in a sci-fi simulator, physics became the *star* of the show, offering players a unique challenge. Typically, when we talk about a sci-fi flight simulator like *Wing Commander, Descent, Storm, Extreme Assault*, and so on, realistic physics is often considered unnecessary. But *Lander* turned this notion upside down. Although the spacecraft in the game is fictional, the physical laws affecting it are entirely real, and players feel their full weight on their own vestibular system. The physics here is truly "alive," providing new pilots with an incredibly exciting challenge and thrill. The only requirement? A high-quality mouse – without it, playing is simply impossible.

In *Quake*, you can play with a low-quality mouse and might not even notice much of a difference. But in *Lander*, it’s simply impossible, no matter how skilled you are. Flying with a bad mouse is like riding a bicycle where the front wheel doesn't respond to the handlebars – it won't last long. A proper pointing device is essential. Those few who had one in 1999 experienced a mind-blowing, unique gaming experience like nothing else at the time. Everyone else, using subpar mice, couldn't even grasp the essence of the game because they simply couldn't control the spacecraft. The frustration from trying to play with a bad mouse drained so much mental energy that the desire to continue vanished instantly. Unfortunately, players didn’t realize that their negative impression of the game wasn’t due to the game itself, but their *own* low-quality mouse. Opinions were permanently spoiled within seconds when they couldn’t even manage to take off.

This didn’t help *Lander* gain popularity, of course. But such were the system requirements – a high-quality mouse. We don’t try to run a game designed for a Core i7 on a 486 PC, do we? A gaming controller, including a mouse, is just as crucial a hardware component as a CPU – perhaps even more so. What’s an FPS shooter without a mouse, even with the most powerful CPU? Nothing. So this "system requirement" isn’t as unusual as it might seem.

What *is* unusual, however, is that this truly revolutionary game mechanic wasn’t first introduced in some experimental indie game – where such innovations usually appear – but in a large-scale Triple-A title, on the level of *Unreal* or *Half-Life*, with corresponding production quality. There has never been a more "authored" Triple-A title in the gaming industry – neither before nor since. Only an independent company like Psygnosis could have taken such a risk. *Lander* essentially invented a new game genre, which has only a distant relation to both simulators and arcades (let alone arcade simulators). While retaining all the advantages of both genres, it somehow avoids their drawbacks. The simulation and arcade aspects of the game are equally pronounced: *Lander* is both a *very* deep simulator and a *very* engaging arcade. But while it is an intense, full-fledged arcade game, *Lander* is also uncharacteristically deep and varied, thanks largely to its realistic physics. At the same time, despite being an ultra-hardcore simulator with an amazingly detailed physics model, it retains the sheer adrenaline rush of an arcade. The Psygnosis team managed to combine the seemingly incompatible – and even take it a step further, enriching hardcore simulation with arcade-like excitement, and vice versa. And it worked.

The courage, dedication, and professionalism of the developers deserve special recognition. Working on a game mechanic with no historical precedent (unlike genre-defining classics like *Doom, Warcraft, GTA3, Myst*) requires a special kind of vision. Creating a new genre from scratch is an extraordinary challenge, but the rewards, if successful, can be absolutely astonishing and completely unexpected. *Lander* is a sort of *sanctuary* of such rewards – and exploring it is truly fascinating.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of this gameplay mechanic is the ability to improve the game experience simply by refining the physics engine. No need to meticulously tweak game balance – a more accurately simulated bullet trajectory already makes the game more arcade-like and thrilling. This is a unique phenomenon in the gaming industry. If you ever find yourself wondering what to do with a cutting-edge physics engine or a dedicated physics accelerator – feed it to *Lander*. It will devour it – and ask for more.

Another important bonus: realism. Sci-fi games had never focused on it before. The priority was always to maintain gameplay and avoid distractions, especially those difficult to implement within a sci-fi setting. But *Lander* shattered that expectation too. Somehow, it always feels incredibly realistic. No matter where your mission takes place – inside a hollow asteroid or on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io – the sensation of reality never fades. For a sci-fi game, this is a rare and extremely valuable quality.

Even mouse control doesn’t conflict with realism (another bonus): in *Lander*, it feels completely natural and seamless, despite being a simulator. Though joystick control is an option, you’ll likely need to tweak it slightly to match *Lander*'s precision.

Another remarkable aspect of this game mechanic is that both control schemes – mouse and joystick – are equally effective. There’s no fundamental difference between them; each has its minor advantages. In fact, *Lander* has an insatiable appetite for high-quality controllers – no matter how much I optimized my joystick for it, I always felt the game demanded something even more advanced.

The missions are impressively diverse – no two are the same. Usually, simulators tend to favor either open spaces (*Storm*) or enclosed environments (*Descent*). But in *Lander*, both are equally thrilling. Combat tactics differ between the two, but both are just as exhilarating. Pilots never get bored. Personally, I always wished *Lander* had a large, living world in the style of *Elite* or *GTA*, as its gameplay mechanics were practically made for an open-world setting.

In 2017, French engineer Franky Zapata created *Flyboard Air*, a nearly exact real-world counterpart to *Lander*’s spacecraft, and brought it to market. While *Flyboard Air* is an open platform rather than an enclosed ship, its control and movement principles – a jet-powered flying platform – are identical.

Feeling what it’s like to pilot such a craft is possible in *Lander* – provided your mouse meets the highest standards of quality. And if you’re curious about how *Lander* plays, a two-minute *Flyboard Air* demo video will tell you more than a three-hour lecture or even gameplay footage.

One thing is certain – as gaming controllers evolve, *Lander*'s triumphant return will be inevitable.

chromax 2024-07-22 0 point

Try DxWnd. It can run some old games better. Also Zeus Glide Wrapper can help.

GameComrade 2024-06-10 -1 point

Does anyone know how to reset its settings? Ran it once, and it worked fine. Then changed some settings, like higher resolution and a different sound config, since it was completely silent the first time, and now all it does is boot to a black screen in either OpenGL or D3D modes.
Also, is there a way to run it in windowed mode, by any chance, because, holy shit does it NOT play well with multiple displays.

kiasia 2023-12-01 1 point

Such a great game. I grew up playing this. Used to spend weekend mornings watching my dad play it before I learnt how to control the ship myself. My dad didn't like flying in the tunnels because it felt claustrophobic so he only played like the first two levels, then once I learnt how to play I eventually got pretty far but then got stuck at the level with the psychedelic tunnels in the snow.

Having to learn how to play games like this is a great thing, it makes it so much more immersive. It's a shame that that seems to be what a lot of people didn't like about it.

Lander deserves a sequel with modern graphics. The game has such a great atmosphere and the low-poly graphics actually lend themselves quite well to the dark sci-fi theme, so visually it holds up pretty well (IMO, I like low-poly stuff) and is still pretty immersive and fun to play.

Ed_Straker 2023-08-03 2 points

What is the difference between DVD and CD Iso versions?

Eminor 2022-12-07 1 point

This is one tough game. Love it.

admin 2022-04-28 1 point

@Rosine very low detection rate on VirusTotal for all 3 exe files, should be safe to use.

Rosine 2022-04-25 0 point

The 111MB download of Lander has a virus embedded in it according to Norton 360 and will not allow the .exe file to run on the computer.

chromax 2020-12-14 2 points

After 20 years I found the solution for this game. It is a 360 controller!

The game was released in a time period when people had mostly no Joystick anymore and gamepads were shitty on PC. So you had to play with Keyboard/Mouse without a seamless Thrust control method. Like in racing games, you had to push the keys sequentially to control only a little bit and this works not very good. With an 360 controller and his trigger you can control the thrust perfectly and voila, the game is not that hard anymore!

The configuration is a little bit fiddly, because you have to go out the game, change controls, go back into a level and so on, but it is worth it. Great game, dark atmosphere and nice light effects. Has a nice ambient soundtrack.

It is also very unique. There are not very much games like this. (only Frontier Pilot Simulator and Dropship United Peace Force)

blahblah 2019-05-10 0 point

Played this 10 years or so ago. It falls into the "Nintendo Hard" category of gaming. It requires a lot of skill and finesse to pilot the landers. Plus, some of the mid-range landers fly worse then the beginer lander.

There's a good faq for it on gamefaqs in case you get stuck in any areas.

Biggest issue is that your lander has a tractor beam that is used for both latching onto cargo to haul it around as well as siphoning gas from fuel pods. (Managing your fuel is a big part of the game, just like old DOS lander games).

The problem is, if you're latched onto cargo, you can't siphon gas. So, there's a button to hit that will turn off the tractor beam, dropping your cargo, letting you siphon gas. This is important, because some missions require you to haul things long distances, and you need to drop the cargo midway in order to siphon gas before heading onwards. Otherwise you end up near the end of the mission flying on fumes. Can't remember what that key is (or key combo), but experiment around when you get to a cargo mission to figure it out sooner rather then later.

The guy that wrote the faq on gamefaqs would use the 1st lander for damn-near the whole game (skipping the 2 early lander upgrades saying they flew like pregnant cows) until he could get to the last 2 landers, and he didn't know how to detach cargo. So, he ended up making some missions harder then they needed to be.. but still succeeded. If you've ever played the game, essentially the guy was playing "impossible mode" difficulty with a self-imposed handicap he didn't realize he was giving himself. Completely nuts that he pulled it off.

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Windows Version

DownloadRIP Version English version 111 MB DownloadDVD Version English version 1.6 GB DownloadISO Version English version 550 MB ManualEnglish version 26 MB

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