A lunar lander game gives you a spacecraft, a patch of rocky ground and one job: put the ship down gently on a flat pad. Touchdown plays that out with honest physics — it is a lander physics game before it is a test of reflexes.
Gravity pulls every second you are in the air. Thrust fires along the way the ship is pointing rather than straight up, so tilting to travel sideways also means tilting back to stop. Nothing slows you down out here, and a drift you ignore at 100 metres is still with you at 10. Every burn costs fuel, and when the tank runs dry the engine is done for that attempt.
Arrive slow, level and on target: under 5.0 m/s vertically, under 3.0 m/s sideways, within 10° of upright, both legs on the pad. The readouts turn red the moment you fall outside those limits, which is what makes this a moon landing game rather than a guessing game — the panel tells you what is about to go wrong while you can still fix it.
Narrow pads pay more, marked ×1, ×2 or ×4 on the pad itself, and fuel you did not burn converts into points. The safe line and the greedy line are rarely the same one. Terrain comes from the level number, so level 7 is identical for everyone and can be learned.
Keyboard on desktop, touch buttons on mobile. Free, in your browser, nothing to install and no account.
Controls
Desktop
| Keys | Action |
|---|---|
← / → or A / D | Rotate the ship |
↑, W or Space | Thrust |
P or Esc | Pause |
M | Mute or restore sound |
R | Quick retry after a crash |
Mobile
Two rotate buttons at the bottom left, one large thrust button at the bottom right. They work together — hold thrust with one thumb and steer with the other. Portrait is fine; there is no need to turn the phone.
Landing requirements
| Check | Limit |
|---|---|
| Vertical speed | 5.0 m/s or less |
| Horizontal speed | 3.0 m/s or less |
| Tilt | Within 10° of upright |
| Position | Both legs on a flat pad |
All four at the same time, at the moment of contact. Crash and the game names the cause — "Too fast — 6.2 m/s vertical", "Tilted 14° on contact", "Missed the pad" — so every wreck tells you which number to fix.
How to land
Fly the descent in this order and most of the difficulty disappears.
- Kill the sideways drift first, while you are still high. Horizontal speed is the one thing you cannot fix in the last second. Tilt about 30° into the drift and burn: that removes the full 3 m/s allowance in roughly a second and a half, and you still gain height while doing it.
- Then get over the pad. Rotating 90° takes one second, and the ship stops turning the instant you let go of the key — there is no spin to fight, so point where you need to and burn.
- Come down under control. The engine is two and a half times the ship's weight, so pointing straight up gains you 2.4 m/s². Thrust is on or off, not a dial: to hold altitude you need it roughly 40 % of the time, which is a rhythm of short taps rather than a held button.
- Let the last few metres go. From a standstill you can fall about 8 metres and still arrive under the 5 m/s limit. Fighting all the way to the ground just burns fuel you could have banked.
The one number worth memorising is your braking distance, because falling is cheap and stopping is not.
| Falling at | Height needed to slow down | Fuel it costs |
|---|---|---|
| 8 m/s | 8 m | 11 |
| 10 m/s | 16 m | 18 |
| 15 m/s | 42 m | 35 |
| 20 m/s | 78 m | 53 |
| 25 m/s | 125 m | 71 |
A full tank is 100 units — about 12 seconds of continuous burn, or 29 seconds of hovering. Reaching 25 m/s therefore spends most of a tank just undoing itself. If you want the reasoning rather than the recipe, we wrote up why this genre is so hard separately.
Three mistakes that end most attempts
- Braking too late. See the table: every second of free fall roughly doubles what the recovery costs. Start slowing while the ground still looks far away.
- Treating sideways speed as a detail. You can be perfectly slow vertically and still break the ship at 3.1 m/s sideways. From level 3 you are handed a drift of up to ±3.2 m/s at the start, and by level 8 up to ±5.2 m/s — the first thing to do after spawning is to look at the H-SPD readout, not the ground.
- Touching down tilted. This one is free to fix. Rotation stops the moment you release the key, so straighten up early and leave the ship upright while you manage the descent.
And on level 8 and beyond, remember the solar wind is an acceleration, not a one-off push: ignore it for ten seconds and it has given you 3.5 m/s sideways — already past the limit on its own.
Scoring and the levels
A landing scores base points multiplied by the pad you chose, plus two points for every unit of fuel still in the tank, plus a bonus for setting down well under the speed limit. An extra ship arrives every 5,000 points, and you start each run with three.
Levels never stop. Pads get narrower, starting fuel drops, and the ground gets more jagged. From level 5 a ridge cuts across the middle and forces you to fly sideways to reach the good pads. From level 8 a solar wind pushes you off line the whole way down — it is announced before the level starts, so it is a problem to plan around rather than a surprise.
About this game
Touchdown is an original game built for PlayNook. What it has in common with other games of this type is the physics, which nobody owns: constant gravity, thrust along the ship's axis, no drag, and a fuel gauge that only goes one way. That idea is older than the arcade — the first version of it ran as a few dozen lines of text in 1969, and we traced the whole story of the genre in a separate article. If you are hunting for a specific older game rather than this one, this guide covers where those live today.
