Lost In Anime Overtones

I've just finished Lost Planet: Extreme Condition and you know what hit me straight away? Man was that ever a short game! I had just got in laughing distance of the five hour mark when I finished off the final boss in typical epic fashion. Not that I'm complaining because I spent just under £7 on the game for new, and seeing as all the cut scenes and repeat tries probably put an extra couple of hours on my core 5, I've basically payed £1 an hour for the game. Not too bad, but not great. Anyway, despite my lack of a sense of accomplishment (I'm sorry, but I need to invest more time in a game to feel that) the game is genuinely good fun.

You play as Wayne, a colonist on planet E.D.N. III; a world that is inhabited by a corupt military, an alien race and a band of snow pirates. I know, it sounds pretty stock already, but wait, it gets worse. Wayne suffers from amnesia (the back bone of every Japanese video game story since forever) and you advance through the game unlocking various key parts of Wayne's history, subsequently unfolding an increasingly intricate story. And I did enjoy the story, despite the obviously anime inspired cut scenes, which to be honest were rather cringe worthy at times (I blame the voice actors and poor characterisation), the stories slow unraveling was akin to something like 24 or The X-Files in the way that every answer provided by the games cut scenes, just created more questions. I really enjoyed seeing the story through to the end, I just had to know what was going to happen next.

So onto the meat of the game, the game play. Search this blog for 'Lost Planet' and you will find that I've already wrote about the game play before, most notably the difficulty curve. So in brief, the difficulty curve is like a stretched out slinky with occasional moments of agonising repeated attempts provided by the boss battles and the reasonably paced parts provided by the rest of the game, with its 'if it moves, kill it' ethos. The action is a bit primitive and the controls do a fell a little bit lumpy and outdated, but I think this is mostly in part due to the games age and the fact that we have been spoiled by super slick controls in games in recent months. One of the odd features of the game is the idea of thermal energy. Your health replenishing abilities require you to kill enemies, scenery and activate map posts in order to top up your thermal energy, but this energy also depletes slowly because of the extreme temperatures the games environments throw at you. This means that both your health and play time are limited. Spend too long in the game and you run out of thermal energy and your health bar begins to deplete. Play the game headstrong and take lots of hits, your health bar has to use more thermal energy and you end up with less time to finish the level. It's an odd dynamic that takes some getting used to, but ultimately offers a unique and positive element to the game.

The only other real notable negative is the soundtrack. It really is a bit lacking and often all you have in some levels is the background noise of the wind whipping around your head as you progress and the gun fire and mech stomping sound effects. The only real positive that comes from this sparser soundtrack is that you do become very well immersed in this sense that you are traipsing across this baron uninhabitable snow dusted rock.

So if you want a decent anime inspired, mech centred action game that wants to be the source material it tries to emulate, you can't go too far wrong with Lost Planet, especially as it seems to have become one of those games that is destined to forever live in the bargain bin. Raid the sofa, check the piggy bank, count the pennies and go and buy it.

7/10

Let Them Keep The Planet

I'm still making my way through Lost Planet on 360 in an attempt to get through it before the next one hits the shelves. I'm finding it a really fun third person shooter, whilst not on par with Gears of War and its younger sibling, its still an accomplished game when you consider how early on in the 360's life it was released. One of the minor gripes I have with the game is the occasional slow down that occurs when there is far too much going on in the screen at once, at the subsequent cheap cluster attacking that the in game enemies insist on doing, causing your health bar to empty at a frightening speed. Although I raise this as an issue, it rarely occurs, especially if you play the game the way it was meant to. One of the more serious issues I want to raise before I finish the game is its difficulty curve.

Most of the game is spent with you, the player, being super man and mowing down wave after wave of baddies, whether they be human or the indigenous inhabitants of planet E.D.N. III. Whilst this is tremendous fun, the game begins to give you a mild case of controller throwing rage when the bosses of the game come around. The difficulty of the game spikes like a child's cholesterol on a visit to McDonalds. I feel that any game should offer a continuously increasing difficulty curve and that said curve should have the odd spike here and there to keep you on your toes, without making the whole of the game a nightmare. But do the difficulty spikes in Lost Planet have to be so harsh? I pretty much never die during the bulk of the game, but when the health bar devastating bosses come along, I do get frustrated.

I think that a part of the problem is that once you get through the adrenaline inducing end of level fights, the game relaxes and returns to its original pace, which whilst not sedate by any stretch of the imagination, is a bit tame when compared to the aforementioned boss battles. It's in these moments after those fights that you ask yourself 'why must the boss fights be so dammed hard?' If the difficulty curve throughout the rest of the game is steady, sticking true to the formula that makes a good game, why on earth are these vain popping segments present?

I plan to persevere in this game, because the story is actually starting to become interesting in a caricature, occasionally cringe worthy kind of way. I just hope that it doesn't do to me what Devil May Cry 4 did and through one of those impossible final bosses that will mean that the game goes unfinished and traded in. Fingers crossed.