Giant Bomb Review
190 CommentsLost Planet 2 Review
2- X360
by Brad Shoemaker on
Everything about this nice-looking, mostly online shooter is cumbersome and unpleasant to deal with in one way or another.
But the unfortunate reality is that every piece of Lost Planet 2 is poorly designed or clumsily bolted onto all the other parts, or both, resulting in an inconsistent, frustrating, and sometimes baffling experience whether you're playing the action or just trying to sift through the byzantine menus. You frequently get the sense that nobody at Capcom ever stepped back and really took a hard look at how all the game's systems fit together, to see if all the mechanics made sense and whether the action was fun to play or not. It's just a roughly made game from top to bottom.
Despite the focus on cooperating with other human beings, Lost Planet 2 makes it maddeningly hard to actually get a co-op game going. You can't bring in players who haven't already reached the point in the campaign that you're trying to play, and likewise you can only join games that are running levels you've already seen yourself. Joining a game in progress doesn't drop you right into the action but merely leaves you staring at a static menu screen showing the players (both real and fake) who are currently playing. Presumably, you'd eventually get to join in the action at a checkpoint, but 15 minutes was the longest I could stand to look at that unmoving screen before quitting out, so I never got to test that particular feature. Other shooters have certainly gotten the chapter-selectable, drop-in style of campaign co-op right--Halo and Gears of War come to mind--so it's hard to understand why this one makes it so tough to just get in and start shooting with friends.
It doesn't help that the campaign isn't really much to write home about, anyway. It takes place some time after the first game, when the previously snow-covered planet E.D.N. III has undergone a rapid warming due to ongoing civil war, developing deserts, jungles, and vast oceans. With the focus squarely on co-op, the missions start to feel generic, almost like a primer for multiplayer, after a while. And since the story shifts from one warring faction to the next between every episode--with most characters wearing face masks and having no obvious names--it's hard to keep up with or really care about the events of the plot. The best part of the campaign is the sheer, ludicrous size of the "category G" akrid monsters, which should be familiar to veterans of the first game. You'll spend most of the campaign in this sequel shooting at human enemies, but every once in a while a boss monster will trot out that's so big it puts almost any other video game boss to shame. Too bad these guys aren't as fun to fight as they are impressive to see; you generally spend 10 to 20 minutes shooting them in glowing weak points, and soaking up a ton of damage from unavoidable attacks, until they finally die (or you do, and revert to the last checkpoint). Having been weaned on Contra in my youth, I'm no stranger to shooting things in glowing weak points until they die, but this is just excessive.
It's too bad that the action in the multiplayer shares the same basic clunkiness of the campaign, though. The core controls just feel awkward, slow, and unresponsive compared to the better shooters on the market. You have to stop moving to change weapons. It takes what feels like forever to get up after getting knocked down. The sprint move feels slower than the regular movement speed. The grappling hook only works on a few surfaces, you can't use it in the air, and it takes way too long to get you on top of a ledge. The list goes on. The aiming and shooting are serviceable, but the movement isn't nearly as streamlined and accessible as it should be to make Lost Planet 2 feel as playable as other contemporary shooters. It's almost as if the game prioritizes long, flashy animations over basic playability. Both modes lean too heavily on meters and numbers, too. The thermal energy from the first game has been modified so that here you can use it to heal yourself and repair vital suits, but it still feels unnecessary. There's also a "battle gauge" that determines how many times you can respawn in the campaign (yes, you respawn, with a timer, even in single-player). The last thing I want to do in a heated firefight is micromanage multiple gauges and statistics that dictate my survivability, but there you have it.
It feels like Capcom barely missed making a great game with Lost Planet 2. It looks fantastic; the multiplatform MT Framework engine that powered Resident Evil 5 last year is still pumping out truly great visuals, the enormous akrid bosses being the most prominent example. With faster and more responsive controls, a better multiplayer framework, and a smoother character progression system, this one could have been surprisingly competitive in its category. But with so many problems holding it back, Lost Planet 2 is hard to recommend against all the other great shooters already out there.
