When I first saw Lost Planet my reaction was *sigh*. It was pretty stupid of CAPCOM to release this at almost the same time as Gears of War because even I knew it wouldn’t do well against a game which had a character wearing armour with the equivalent weight of an articulated lorry. There was also a gun with a chainsaw on the end. The moment you try to compete with that, you’re going to loose.
So, what about the gameplay. It’s repetitive and un-imaginative. You have to collect “Thermal Energy” to stop yourself from freezing to death. This “Thermal Energy” is obtained from killing enemies, there’s no explanation as to why the enemies drop these glowing orange blobs, they just do. That was my first beef with this game. It’s really very easy to kill everything, far too easy in fact and you actually end up with an excess of “Thermal Energy” meaning you can dither about for as long as you like before moving on. I thought this was supposed to be “Extreme Condition(s)” not “Average Conditions”. You can only carry two guns but you only ever need one, the machine gun, because there’s so much ammo either lying about or on the disappearing corpses of your enemies that running out never becomes a problem.
Upon starting up the demo I immediately checked out the controls, only to find that they were displayed as Xbox 360 controls. Hello CAPCOM, I’m playing this demo on a PC, console controls are useless to me. The least they could have done was change the controls screen so that it actually showed keyboard controls rather than things like “Right Trigger = Fire”. MY KEYBOARD HAS NO “Right Trigger”!!! It was then that I threw caution to the wind and set about picking one of two levels.
My first impression was “Oh dear” as I moved the character around in a clunky and boring fashion. The animations aren’t brilliant, neither is the AI and the environments felt dull with their un-inspired graphics. In fact, the whole demo was just 375MB of dreary mediocrity. Thankfully STEAM has the option to “Remove all local content.” Which I quickly did upon finishing the demo. Well, when I say “finishing” I actually mean getting so frustrated at the stupidity of the game overall I gave up.
The worst part is that it could have been good. Great even. If only CAPCOM hadn’t made stupid decisions and employed simpletons to design and make the game. Here’s what I think they should have done. Instead of “Thermal Energy” being dropped from enemies, they should have put things like burning barrels in certain places so that you had to stay near them to warm up before you could move on. The enemies should have been harder rather than the push-overs that most of them are. There really needed to be more imagination in the design stages. Then again, this is CAPCOM and they’re aren’t known for their brilliant imagination (see; Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Street Fighter).
PC Gamer threw an 81/100 at this game, I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion but after all, they are the “Frat Boys” of the PC gaming demographic so a proper review wasn’t really to be expected. My advice, don’t buy this game unless you’re looking to be bored or annoyed out of your skull. It’s weak attempts at being good are over-shadowed by the fact it’s a total let down. Spend your money on something better. Like Gears of War.
3/10 = Pitiful.
P.M.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Cool review, an honest review of a game that they obviously put little effort into.