The Globe and Mail

• Reviewed on:

  Xbox 360

• Also available for:

  N/A
  

• The Good:

  Gorgeous smoke and snow effects. The single player mode is an exciting and fun rush to survive the levels, and multiplayer is competent, if not remarkable.

• The Bad:

  Simply too many flaws in the controls and design to be entirely satisfying. The plot, though rabidly insane, is stultifyingly dull.

• The Verdict:

  Intentionally impossible to compare to the other third-person shooters on the Xbox 360, Lost Planet still doesn't quite reach the bar it sets for itself.
• 
  

It's generally a given that the new year that we've just entered is 2007 A.D, but for Xbox 360 owners it looks like we're going to have to come to terms with living in 1 A.G.: After Gears.

Announced at CES as having sold an astounding 2.7 million copies worldwide, there can be few Xbox 360 owners that haven't played Gears of War at least once, and I sincerely doubt that there are many that, uninterested in its unusual take on the third-person shooter, would be hungry for Lost Planet, a new third-person shooter that joins a marketplace already crowded with other top quality titles such as Rainbow Six: Vegas.

Lost the Plot

There is one very special thing setting Lost Planet aside from its competitors, however, the hand of Keiji Inafune in development. As producer of the Xbox 360's most unique hit, Dead Rising, Inafune created a game full of memorable moments, and players could hope that as producer of Lost Planet he could make it stand out from underneath the shadow of Gears of War.

Set on the perpetually snowy planet of E.D.N III, the plot of the game follows Wayne, an amnesiac who only seems to remember that a giant Akrid (the game's most ubiquitous enemy) called "Green Eye" killed his dad.

Quickly hooking up with a rag-tag bunch of snow pirates, including the somewhat unsuitably dressed love interest Luka (sub-zero temperatures shouldn't really allow that much cleavage to be shown, really) Wayne finds himself wrapped up in a story much bigger than the simple quest for revenge he thought he was on, including a ludicrous number of plot-twists, revelations and betrayals that quickly become more and more nonsensical, culminating in a final battle that honestly seems to have no relation to anything that happened prior to it.

In general, the plot feels entirely disconnected from the levels that you're playing.

The levels themselves, though, are initially gorgeously emotive of a snowy wasteland, as Wayne struggles through deep snow and frozen buildings on his quest to destroy the Akrid. Unfortunately as the plot progresses you are taken further and further away from the snow, removing a great deal of the game's initial charm.

Planet of the VS

Beyond the equally different setting, other comparisons to Gears of War or Rainbow Six are similarly ludicrous. Lost Planet has absolutely no squad based combat; the controls don't even feature any ability to take cover (!) From the off, Lost Planet seems entirely anachronistic in the year 1 A.G., with most battles taking the form of circle-strafing tests of endurance or clumsy ducking and diving between cover, particularly when playing online.

Lost Planet's trump card, then, has to be the promise of controlling huge robots known as "Vital Suits" which take forms such as slow lumbering chicken-walkers, huge spider-bots, and speedy flying humanoid suits, with many of the suits able to transform.

Though the VS are an interesting addition, they actually add very little to the singleplayer mode in general, as in many cases they are so slow and cumbersome to maneuver that you are better off on foot, and in general when the plot requires you to be in a VS you'll be in suit that is most similar to controlling Wayne. In multiplayer, of course, skillful usage of the right VS can be the difference between winning and losing.

Not Extremely Sporting

Lost Planet is not a deep game; in fact, it calls to mind more the intense 2D action titles of the late-80s and early 90s such as the Contra series more easily than it does an FPS. In singleplayer mode the amount of enemies on screen can often number in the hundreds, and, in a demand that will seem absurd to most gamers used to killing everything in their way (a la Gears of War), more often than not you'll have to simply run past them all to survive, due to many sections which feature endlessly respawning enemies. Several sections do feature obvious (and destroyable) spawn points, but there are just as many without.

This serves to make the game much more of a frantic, though often fun, rush through the levels than its contemporaries, and is further set apart by the screen filling boss battles that end each level. Equal parts breathtaking and frustrating, too often you'll find Wayne obscured by (astonishingly realistic) smoke plumes, or killed while in the middle of standing up thanks to his incredibly slow recovery animations.

Conditional Love

And it's these kind of niggling problems that stop Lost Planet being as good as it so obviously could be, awful plot not withstanding. The game has an idiosyncratic control method to start with, and drops such terrible clangers such as not allowing Wayne to look directly up, a crime when you regularly face flying enemies.

Multiplayer does have a lot to recommend it: it's not as slavishly team based as Gears of Wars, and features an interesting (if ultimately meaningless) leveling system, but the gameplay is still clumsy in comparison to its contemporaries.

Lost Planet is not a bad game; it's merely a flawed one. And in 1 A.G. that's not good enough.