2008 Woodie Awards
Vote Absentee
'Lost Planet' good for rental, but not much else
Mustafa Gatollari
Issue date: 1/30/07 Section: Life & Leisure
- Page 1 of 1
Okay, so you have an XBOX 360, and when it's not vomiting glitches out of its disc tray and deleting your XBOX Live profile data, you're playing "Gears of War" (the only 360 game you should own, everything else is a rental, save for "Dead Rising." It's a FACT, not a bias). So did Capcom make a buyable game for the 360 when it released its third person shooter, Lost Planet?IEW
Let's look at its strong points. The storyline is pretty cool: you're stuck in a winter wonderland of below zero temperature trying to kill an alien creature called "Green Eye" that was responsible for the death of your father. It's a type of Akrid (a creature indigenous to the "Lost Planet"), and these giant bug-like creatures infest the arctic-climate world of the game.
However, the characters suffer some bad Japanese video game clichés. First off, your main character, "Wayne," wakes up in the presence of some helpful strangers with amnesia: the only thing he remembers is his name, the fact that his father was killed by this "Green Eye" monster, and that he wants to avenge his pops. You have your tall, handsome, omniscient dude watching over you, your spunky young sidekick type, and a big bosomed impossibly gorgeous girl who still manages to show off her cleavage even in the life killing weather of the game.
Now the cold weather of the game is more than just a setting for the action, it also functions as one of Lost Planet's most interesting components: "thermal energy." Everything in the world of this game runs on this energy, including you. Your suit has a pack full of it, unfortunately, it slowly denigrates. Lucky for you each akrid monster keeps a whole pouch of the stuff in their innards. All you have to do is kill them and pick up the orange haze, then your good to go. It functions more as a time device, to keep you from wandering the game's levels too much and give a sense of urgency to each mission, which is how the game is divvied up.
The thermal energy is also used (but more quickly than just walking) in piloting the mech-like VS robots that are scattered throughout the game. Yeah, Wayne also remembers how to pilot one of these bad boys in his amnesiatic state. They're most useful for boss encounters as you don't take any direct damage from being in one (but they have their own life bar). Controlling the VS is really easy and intuitive and its weaponry is standard heavy artillery fare: chain gun that overheats with the optional rocket attachments. You can also equip two chain guns for double damage.
Your character, Wayne, is much more free in his controls. He can jump more quickly and perform an evasive roll. The neatest addition to the standard third person shooter repertoire is Wayne's rocket grappling hook. You can climb mountainsides and swing to new locations. It's not just a gimmick but a tool used a fair amount of times in the game; Capcom did well.
But in the end, the game isn't worth buying. Missions are all alike: point aim and shoot, strafe, reload, shoot; pick up thermal energy, rinse and repeat. The game does boast some pretty diverse and interesting locations (caves, underground passages, abandoned warehouses) but they're mere settings. If anything, they do boast the graphical power of the 360. The effects of the snow are beautiful, especially when you're digging through mounds of it to pick up a rocket launcher, or when a giant Akrid bursts out of the ground to bite your face off. Capcom did great with the graphics, but playing more than one half hour mission at a time is sleep inducing because the action is so repetitive. The game isn't difficult to beat in a day, save for the boredom one will feel after beating one mission.
Oh and if you have a brother or sister who wants to play, and you only have a memory card and not a hard drive, Sally or Billy can forget about having their own story mode file. This "single file" trend is really frustrating for multiple gamers in a household; it's not that difficult to manage game makers! The PSX did it with a 150-kilobyte memory card, and Microsoft can't do it with a 64 megabyte one! Just like almost every other 360 game that's out there, rent this one, and get back to playing Gears of War online.
Mustafa Gatollari is a Junior English major at Rutgers-Newark
Let's look at its strong points. The storyline is pretty cool: you're stuck in a winter wonderland of below zero temperature trying to kill an alien creature called "Green Eye" that was responsible for the death of your father. It's a type of Akrid (a creature indigenous to the "Lost Planet"), and these giant bug-like creatures infest the arctic-climate world of the game.
However, the characters suffer some bad Japanese video game clichés. First off, your main character, "Wayne," wakes up in the presence of some helpful strangers with amnesia: the only thing he remembers is his name, the fact that his father was killed by this "Green Eye" monster, and that he wants to avenge his pops. You have your tall, handsome, omniscient dude watching over you, your spunky young sidekick type, and a big bosomed impossibly gorgeous girl who still manages to show off her cleavage even in the life killing weather of the game.
Now the cold weather of the game is more than just a setting for the action, it also functions as one of Lost Planet's most interesting components: "thermal energy." Everything in the world of this game runs on this energy, including you. Your suit has a pack full of it, unfortunately, it slowly denigrates. Lucky for you each akrid monster keeps a whole pouch of the stuff in their innards. All you have to do is kill them and pick up the orange haze, then your good to go. It functions more as a time device, to keep you from wandering the game's levels too much and give a sense of urgency to each mission, which is how the game is divvied up.
The thermal energy is also used (but more quickly than just walking) in piloting the mech-like VS robots that are scattered throughout the game. Yeah, Wayne also remembers how to pilot one of these bad boys in his amnesiatic state. They're most useful for boss encounters as you don't take any direct damage from being in one (but they have their own life bar). Controlling the VS is really easy and intuitive and its weaponry is standard heavy artillery fare: chain gun that overheats with the optional rocket attachments. You can also equip two chain guns for double damage.
Your character, Wayne, is much more free in his controls. He can jump more quickly and perform an evasive roll. The neatest addition to the standard third person shooter repertoire is Wayne's rocket grappling hook. You can climb mountainsides and swing to new locations. It's not just a gimmick but a tool used a fair amount of times in the game; Capcom did well.
But in the end, the game isn't worth buying. Missions are all alike: point aim and shoot, strafe, reload, shoot; pick up thermal energy, rinse and repeat. The game does boast some pretty diverse and interesting locations (caves, underground passages, abandoned warehouses) but they're mere settings. If anything, they do boast the graphical power of the 360. The effects of the snow are beautiful, especially when you're digging through mounds of it to pick up a rocket launcher, or when a giant Akrid bursts out of the ground to bite your face off. Capcom did great with the graphics, but playing more than one half hour mission at a time is sleep inducing because the action is so repetitive. The game isn't difficult to beat in a day, save for the boredom one will feel after beating one mission.
Oh and if you have a brother or sister who wants to play, and you only have a memory card and not a hard drive, Sally or Billy can forget about having their own story mode file. This "single file" trend is really frustrating for multiple gamers in a household; it's not that difficult to manage game makers! The PSX did it with a 150-kilobyte memory card, and Microsoft can't do it with a 64 megabyte one! Just like almost every other 360 game that's out there, rent this one, and get back to playing Gears of War online.
Mustafa Gatollari is a Junior English major at Rutgers-Newark
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