Finding a game like Lost Planet: Extreme Condition in the vast genre of the First Person Shooter is like that moment of indescribable joy when you discover a Playboy in the attic at the ripe age of 13. From the first moments of game play, the scale of Lost Planet is immense, the battles intense, and the environment completely immersive.
The player is in the middle of the battle for a new Earth. What was thought to be a lifeless ball of ice capable of supporting the population, turned out to be inhabited by a race of alien bugs hell bent on killing you and every other human they find. Adding insult to injury, snow pirates – the remnants of the first inhabitants of this bitter world – want you dead just as much as the bugs known as the Akrid.
At any point in the game you get to carry at most two weapons plus a bunch of different hand grenades. The auto aim can be annoying at times as it tends to target the nearest enemy – even if they’re behind a pillar. Besides those few quirks, Lost Planet excels at offering ways to blow shit up and kill things. The player can choose from automatics, shotguns, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, lasers, and energy guns – including the heavy duty versions mountable on mech type robots. To stay alive, you must kill all the enemies and also collect their thermal energy – without it you will literally freeze into a solid brick of ice.
The plot and voice acting is about average as any other first person shooter, but the slack is picked up rapidly by the game play. The controls are intuitive, although the game suffers from an inability to actually view the layout while playing. Also, this game lacks the ability to save progress during game play. The actual location of save points is a mystery to me, as I thought the game saved at data posts, subsequent respawns landed me no where near them. I still prefer the ability to save as I play, Capcom hasn’t learned anything from Dead Rising yet.
Still, I give the game 5 stars, it’s worth a rent, definitely worth a buy. Lost Planet is by far the best FPU for the Xbox 360 I have played yet. It’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s violent. The trifecta of a successful game.
