Lost Planet to put it quite bluntly is one of the worst titles I have played this year, and one responsible for more frustration than any other. The myriad of flaws in the game come together to create a highly frustrating poorly construed third person shooter that seems to be making an attempt to return to the old school days of shoot em ups and failing miserably by not really delivering on the fun.
Lost Planet takes place on a ice covered frozen world which humans are colonising, unfortunately humanity soon discovers it isn't alone and hordes of aliens also inhabit this world. Being humans of course we don't give up and create some huge mechs to fight back against the alien menace and fly back there to kill them en masse, trying to obtain the precious heat energy inside them for our own purposes at the same time. Essentially that's the plot, your one of the troops battling the aliens, your Dad gets killed by an alien you get owned by the same said alien and you join up with a team of snow pirate salvagers to get revenge. The cast you team up with aswell as you as a lead all are fairly bland, dull and unlike able and some of the plot revelations are delivered with laughable simplicity, but seeing as this is an action game a bad plot could be forgivable, so lets look at the gameplay
Gameplay in lost planet involves you on foot or in a mech fighting hordes of enemies, alien, human and machine alike and occasionally fighting large boss encounters. You run around blasting away with your guns, collecting thermal energy (which constantly depletes due to the cold) to stay alive and occasionally grappling onto things. In premise things sound o.k but a lot of the gameplay doesn't actually work. First off the constant collection of thermal energy is annoying. It depletes at a steady rate anyway, but when your injured depletes even faster, you have to constantly locate the glowing orbs or your going to be dead pretty speedily. This is usually ok but some moments, particularly in boss fights when you need to be looking at the boss instead of hugging glowing orange orbs for warmth can be very frustrating, what's wrong with just having a reasonable health bar?
A major gripe I have about the games combat is not really the gameplay itself but more the games visual effects affecting the gameplay. For example when in a mech you can launch a rocket at a large alien and boss, have a huge amount of smoke and explosion fill the screen, then be dead 2 seconds later as you couldn't see what the hell was going on due to the explosion and for some reason the enemy could. Similar situations arise from grenade explosions, snow storms etc.. and while it could be argued the grandiose effects add to the realism and atmosphere of the game, for me they were a real pain and resulted in many a death. Could they just last a bit less time?
By far, FAR the worst issue with this game though is the controls, particularly the grappling hook. Everything from on foot to mech control feels like your encased in a block of shower gel, slow, unresponsive and clunky, and when your fighting fast huge aliens this can be a major issue and usually results in them eating your head. The grappling hook is by far one of the worst features I've come across in a game and even climbing up a simple ledge can be a challenge as you need to get to the exact spot on the ledge or you'll be plummeting to earth again. The addition of swinging across chasm's later in the game (plus some dire first person jumping) only makes the uselessness of the tool become more evident and frustrating as once again you get a face full of snow covered rock face and plummet to your doom. Lovely.
The multiplayer aspect of the game is actually (thankfully) a bit better than the single player offering a fun and addictive blast if a bit too devoid of variety to be played for more than a few weeks, it's the one redeeming feature the title has to offer in the cesspit of it's gameplay. Things are a bit more even if your fighting someone having the exact same problems as you, especially as the human players you fight in multiplayer don't have huge spear like legs ready to impale you to death or burst out from the snow beneath you ready to dine on non-interesting lead character legs.
In short Lost Planet is badly made, badly executed and really doesn't have a redeeming feature other than the brief solace that is it's multiplayer. If you really want an old school shoot em up, I suggest you actually buy one of the old ones instead as they are invariably better than this dross
