"ICED TO MEET YOU!"

Watching trailers of the original Lost Planet was what made me want an Xbox 360. When the game finally came out, it had its flaws, but I still loved it. When the sequel was revealed, I was very excited.

Lost Planet 2 takes place a decade after the original. This time around, the planets snowy regions have begun to melt, revealing jungles, deserts, and other areas. That’s both a good and a bad thing. On one hand, I really enjoyed the lonely ice planet of the first, but it is nice to have a little more variety in terrain this time around. You’ll even have some missions near the end that take place on a space station, complete with low gravity.

The first major change apparent in Lost Planet 2 is the new focus on co-op. Missions now are taken on in groups of four. Ideally, this means teaming up with three friends or randoms online. You can also play with one friend locally through a staggered split-screen, similar to Resident Evil 5.

The way the campaign is broken up is a little confusing. Episodes are broken into chapters which are then broken into missions. What really confused as well as frustrated me, is that missions don’t save your progress. While they will take you to a mission results screen, you’ll need to make it to the full chapter end in order to save.

Technically, this isn’t any worse than the original Lost Planet, which was already known for having ridiculously long levels. Still, the long nature of these sessions doesn’t lend itself well to keeping a team together in multiplayer. And frankly, you will need to keep that team together.

"This is a four man job."

Lost Planet 2‘s campaign not only allows co-op, it practically requires it. Yes, the game lets you play by yourself, assisted by AI comrades, but the game’s difficulty doesn’t seem to scale based on the number of players and your AI buddies are almost completely worthless.

Some of the level design also shows its singe-player hostility. One boss fight in particular involves a giant turret on a train that requires one person to fire while others use separate devices to rotate the turret, load and energize gigantic shells into it, and run to far away cooling devices to heal your train car. Your AI partners are too dumb to handle those jobs properly, so you better find some friends to play with if you want that mission to go smoothly. The game makes it abundantly clear it was not designed to be played alone. In fact, there is even a re-spawn countdown timer when playing by yourself in offline mode.

When you are playing with other human players, things can actually be pretty fun. You’ll all share a pool of lives via the Battle Gauge. Each time anybody dies, the gauge will lower, but capturing data posts and completing missions within a chapter will raise it. Capturing data posts will also provide you with new spawn points and fill in your map.

In each episode, you’ll control a different group of characters, none of which are ever named, making the story really hard to follow. As you progress, you’ll earn credits for customizing your character, and most importantly, your weapon load-out.

The biggest downfall of this system is that what you unlock with your credits is determined by a roulette. While weapons and abilities are a thrill to acquire, more often than not, random chance will instead award you with an emote or title. It can be incredibly frustrating.

"Plenty of Vital Suit on Vital Suit action."

When you do earn weapons, the custom load-outs are a genuinely cool idea. Basically, you have different slots for different weapon types. On the character customization screen, you fill these slots with your desired weapons. At one point, I had the choice of a shotgun or revolver to fill my “short range” slot. Which of the two guns I could pick up from a short range gun powerup is determined by that customization.

Like the original, Lost Planet 2 has plenty of gun and grenade types to play with. There are disc grenades you can throw like a Frisbee, dummy grenades (some of which can fire their own guns), and even regen grenades that heal, to name just a few. Besides your own gun load-out, there are still plenty of Vital Suit (VS) weapons that can be used while piloting a VS or ripped off of one and used on foot.

This time around, there are Vital Suits that multiple people can ride. There are also other vehicles such as helicopters and speeder bikes. All the different vehicles and VS weapons really keep things interesting throughout the campaign.

The campaign missions vary in both quality and type. The best missions are those that take you through a natural progression toward a destination. The game, however, likes to break things up with other types including objectives like “guard this area for awhile” and “shoot through the window of a train at enemies on another train”. Because of this, I found myself only enjoying about half of what the campaign had to offer.

"Activating Data Posts grants you your map and spawn points."

The worst aspect of the game is blowback. When you are hit by anything, you’re interrupted. Luckily, you can turn friendly fire off, but enemies will still often prevent you from firing or healing. Worse still, you will get knocked over a lot. Often times, I would get stuck in an infinite loop of getting knocked over just as I was getting up from being knocked over. This is one of the things that make the game incredibly difficult.

Lost Planet 2 is visually stunning. This is especially apparent in the boss battles which often pit you against ridiculously giant Akrid. The scope of some of these battles is incredible. While they can sometimes run a bit long, they are pretty mesmerizing.

Unfortunately, the game’s controls are still a bit unintuitive. While you can (and will) immediately turn up the aiming speed, there is no way to fully map the buttons the way you want them. There are a few pre-made control schemes to choose from, but I found that I could only get about half the controls I wanted in one scheme, and the other half in another with no way to combine the two.

The campaign isn’t all Lost Planet 2 has to offer. The versus modes are actually a lot of fun. There are a decent number of options and modes. Grabbing data posts still grants you your map and spawn points giving it a Battlefield vibe (in a good way). There’s also all the different Vital Suits and other vehicles from the campaign throughout the maps. There’s nothing quite like taking out a bunch of other players on the ground with a helicopter only to be blown up by giant mech.

Lost Planet 2 is not something I’d recommend to offline gamers. The campaign just isn’t meant for one person, and even some of the missions can feel “understaffed” when you’re playing 2-player split-screen. However, if you have enough people to play with you, the campaign definitely has its “wow” moments amid the rough patches, and the versus modes are definitely worthwhile. After all, how many third person shooters let you pilot mechs as you storm a space station or let you get devoured by a behemoth and destroy it from the inside?

This review is based on a copy of the Xbox 360 version of Lost Planet 2 provided to us by Capcom.

Tags: capcom, co-op, Lost Planet 2, mechs, multiplayer, ps3, third person shooter, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.