Having been quite ill recently, and in combination with loads of money from Christmas overtime etc, i’ve had lots of time and money with which to get to know my Xbox360. One of the games that i’ve really enjoyed has been Lost Planet.
There’s been a lot of hype concerning this game, and while it doesn’t have the immediately noticeable graphics of Gears of War, they are still a lot better than your average game, especially when you consider that a lot of the levels are vast, open areas.
In the game you play the role of a Snow Pirate called Wayne, on the planet EDN III. Basically, humans colonize EDN III, then find out its inhabited By aliens knows as the Akrid (This is the part of the story that bothers me, if you can colonize planets, surely you would know if is inhabited or not!). The humans are forced to retreat off the planet, but come back in order to defeat the Akrid, as it is understood they posses precious Thermal energy. Snow pirates are humans who didn’t make it off the planet. And that’s what you play as.

Hit the Jump

The game is played from a third person perspective, but can be zoomed closer to the player character. The game is really easy to get used to, but can be hard in places if you don’t know what to do.

The aim of the game is just to kill akrid really, collecting Thermal energy (T-ENG) on the way. T-ENG is what keeps you alive, and powers the Mech you find.
You get the standard weapons, a FAMAS type machine gun, a shotgun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle etc. But the game really comes into its own when you start finding Vital Suits (VS). These are mostly Bi-pedal mechs, with a quad-ped and snow bike transformer variant. These are what make the game so sweet. The Basic VS has just a boost jump function and two weapon slots, although later in the game you start finding ones with chainsaw arms and longer jump abilities.

The VS make the game so much more tactical, because, although you get more firepower, ammunition etc, the also deplete your T-ENG like nobodies business, and that’s not good, not at all.

I found the game quite short, although I was ill at home playing it way to much, but there are 11 missions ranging from about 30-50 minutes each, with added frustration if you die just before a checkpoint.

One thing that really impressed me about this game, mainly because I’ve never seen it before, was a visual ammo counter next to the targeting reticule. I’ve never seen that, and I thought “wow, what a good idea”, seeing as it did save me from dying a good few times because I should have been looking desperately in the corner or something.

All in all, a good game. but definitely not worth the 45 smackers I laid down for it, although I haven’t checked out the multiplayer, due to the 56k dial up modem my folks seem to have some sort of attachment to.

Oh, one more thing, the particle effects in this game are the best i’ve ever seen in a game. EVER. You just wait until you see a VS explode, then you’ll know what i mean.

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