Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

"Lost Planet: Extreme Need Of Work"

Lost planet, a game made by a company I particularly favor a lot, Capcom. Year after year, huge title after title, from Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Devil May Cry and Megaman, Capcom has always had millions of fans loving their games. Now, their newest hit, Lost planet is out for the Xbox 360 and I must say, it does live up to it's name. Now many people out there, like to ask "Is this game better than Gears of War?" Well quite frankly, I find the two games different. In this review, I will not be comparing the two until the end. I want you, the reader, to see what this game has to offer and why it shouldn't be compared to Gears.

First like always, I like to begin the review with the storyline. However, this time I will try to keep it as brief as I can without spoiling too much. A form of aliens named Akrids are on a distant planet basically running it. You the human race are in a war with them. As time passes these Akrids get stronger and more difficult to kill. Of course, the humans develop better weapons to fight them. Due to an incident, the main character is teamed together with a small, sort of a resistance type group which consists of a hot female, a young guy and an old guy. You are to basically do the things they need to get done, which is mainly the whole game. Sort of like Megaman, you get a mission, you go do it, you fight a boss, rinse and repeat. I don't particularly like the storyline, but it does keep me a little interested in what is going to happen next. (Now I said I would be brief, most of the stuff I wrote was simplified to avoid any spoilers. If and when you play this, you will understand what I mean.)

Graphics. I must say that I am pretty disappointed here. The game seems to lack the dedication of detail. Most of the game is in snow, so that sort of takes away any effort of details right away, I mean, it's just one color, white. Although not the entire game is in the slow, there are places where you go indoor that looks pretty good, but again, it doesn't stand out like it should. However, the graphics are at least good enough compared to other games out there, but I would of expected it to look a lot better.

Music. I found myself playing my own music due to the dull boring music. Sometimes you are just running around with silence and that gets pretty boring, pretty fast. Now when you fight the bosses, then they have that ever so lovely boss musics. But so far, none of them are making my remember them...

Game play. Like I mentioned before, this reminds me of Megaman. First, you are sent out to do objectives, while you are trying to do these, you are attacked by aliens, humans and other things that looked like it came out of a comic book. After all that is done and dandy, you will fight a huge ridiculously large form of a boss. Now, your first reaction is to shoot the thing and hope for the best, but there is a catch. Each boss has a weak point, where you have to get to somehow. Sound easy? Sure, if you can see most of the time. You will need to rely on your radar on the top right hand corner, that huge red dot is the boss. Some bosses like to fly and burrow underground so you will have to keep your feet moving. As well a sharp eye.

Now this game is entirely in the third person view, unlike Gears, where it is over the shoulder and when you shoot you go in first person. This game doesn't have that nor has the same feeling. Now my main problem about this game play is that there is this number under your health bar. Now I am going to again, try to not spoil much here. This number continues to decrease throughout the game, every time you destroy something or kill an enemy, they drop red orbs. These replenish the time by adding on more. There are also these checkpoints that add a huge amount for you. The good thing about this decreasing number is that it keeps you alive as long as you have some there. For example, if you health bar goes all the way down, the numbers bring it back up for you, making you last a little longer. Of course the frustration comes in when that number hits zero and you still have a long way to go in a boss fight.

Flaws. There are a few here, first is the small subtitles and the mission briefing. Yeah, you can hear what they are saying, but I like to actually read what the characters are saying. The radar doesn't help much, only to really tell you where the enemies are. Camera angle is tough to control sometimes. Lack of any good music, remember I say that music makes most of a game.

In Closing. Rent or buy. I will say Rent, or get your hands on the demo. I should of waited for this game to drop in it's price, because it is not worth the $60. And to me, if you don't play online, it was a rip off to get the special edition. So in my opinion, I would say that Gears was a better game, but even without the comparison, this game is a pretty bad title, especially from a Company that I love. So maybe, Capcom will learn from their mistakes or maybe they will make it even better if they plan to make another Lost planet. But until then, this game needs a lot of work.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/29/07