News

It's easy to pinpoint the exact second when frustration with a video game begins to overwhelm its charms: You start speaking to your on-screen character, usually sarcastically, deriding his or her abilities in an attempt to distance yourself from imminent failure.

During my travels through the snow-filled Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, a new Teen-rated shooter for the Xbox 360, that first one-sided conversation with its hero, a young man named Wayne, went something like this:

"Okay, Wayne, this is your 23rd fight against the gigantic alien creature who killed your father. Here come the flying ice cones, just like the other 22 times -- no, don't dodge them, don't respond in any way to the buttons I am pushing. Just stand there in a mechanical suit with booster rockets on its back, the one that moves really fast in the commercials, and let huge icicles pound you into a fine dust. Good strategy, Wayne."

And that was the end of attempt 23.

It took more than 30 tries, for the record, to down Green Eye, an armadillo-like beast with glowing weak points, and that achievement put me roughly halfway through this hodgepodge of a game.

Its creators have apparently soaked up every cliché in that sanctuary of escapism where video games meet science fiction, and the result is an experience that pleases the optic nerve, yet leaves the rest of the brain largely undisturbed.

But let's back up to those charms -- Lost Planet does have winning qualities. It arrived with a fair amount of expectation, having taken top honours at last year's Leipzig Games Convention in Germany, and Capcom, its publisher, put up playable demos on Xbox Live that were downloaded more than one million times.

The game mixes run-and-gun action on an icy planet with long sections featuring those robot-like mechanical suits. Wayne, an amnesiac snow pirate, has a grappling hook so he can slingshot up buildings and mountainsides, and he can pull huge weapons from the suits and carry them around.

In the freezing habitat -- think Inuvik in January on a planetary scale -- the collection of "thermal energy," an orange substance carried by bug-like aliens, is linked to Wayne's health and accounts for most of the novelty in the game. When the hulking extraterrestrials are drained of enough energy, they freeze in place -- it is a striking sight -- and the arcade-style levels are designed to keep you moving through hordes of foes. There are snow worms modelled on the sand creatures that act as a public transportation system in Dune, and human enemies from a corporation gone bad, if you can imagine such a thing.

All of these basic elements sound fun and, at first glance, they look great, but Lost Planet may have too much of everything for its own good. The controls feel sluggish, which makes sense when sequences take place in waist-deep snow, but this thing almost grinds to a halt during scenes that should be full of action. The sheer quantity of things to blow up means that there is little flow and the painfully bad story segments provide few rewards for surviving each level. Lost Planet's dialogue seems to have been randomly pulled from B-movie scripts that even Roger Corman would find lame.

Playing it, you can't help but wonder how so much time, money and energy, thermal and otherwise, could be spent creating something that delivers so little. I probably would not feel that way if Lost Planet had arrived 10 years ago since it is, at heart, a simple shoot-'em-up arcade game, exploding barrels and all. But with a team of creative people taking years to develop a fully imagined world and all its inherent possibilities, you can't help but expect more. Not more in terms of screen bloat to add to the slow-motion commotion, but at least one moment that can trigger an emotional response and say something at the same time.

Franz Kafka, who in my view would have been an avid gamer, wrote that fiction should "be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us." Lost Planet has breaking ice all over the place, but it never threatens that skating rink under the surface.