Lost Planet Review
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition certainly creates a unique world for its
setting. The planet E.D.N. III is a frozen wasteland populated by aggressive
beasts of all sizes known as the Akrid and home to roving gangs of mech-riding
pirates perpetually at war with each other. The brutal cold is so harsh that it
will eat away at your health if you don’t constantly replenish the thermal
energy that serves as your shield. The game does a great job of bringing this
environment to life, as you move between frozen wastes beset by howling winds to
abandoned cities locked in massive snow drifts. The constant leaching of your
thermal energy drives home the feeling that it is indeed horrendously cold on
E.D.N. III and adds tension to the game even when you’re not beset by Akrid and
pirates. All of this sounds great and it can be fun, but for every cool idea
(sorry) the game puts forward there’s a corresponding issue that takes some of
the fun out of it.
Lost Planet comes across as a bit of a confused game. It seems that there was
little communication or coordination between the teams designing the
environments, the mission goals, and the story. The game is set in the future on
a distant world but you’ll see things like city streets straight out of a small
Midwestern town or SUVs trapped in snow drifts. Humanity has been trying to
colonize the world for 150 years, but why mankind is interested in a planet that
makes Hoth look like Aruba is not really all that clear. And then there’s the
nearly nonsensical story which can’t even quite manage to explain why you’re
undertaking your next mission … and why your team always sends you out alone to
do the dirty work (it could be because the snowsuit worn by the woman on the
team would give her a severe case of mammary glandular frostbite). Thankfully
you can just skip these overly long and pointless cutscenes and just go into
your next mission purely for the fun of dealing out death to giant monsters and
ice pirates.
When you’re trudging through the snow on a mission you’ll need to monitor your
thermal energy level. Once this is drained to zero you’ll begin losing health
and will die if you don’t find any thermal energy sources. While this was
undoubtedly added to apply a little pressure to the gameplay, in practice it
essentially becomes a non-factor. This is because it’s never hard to find
thermal energy. Everything that you kill drops it, Akrid or human, and you can
always blow-up a derelict tank or similar structure to find some as well. The
game will let you pour more and more energy into your pool to the point where
you really don’t need to worry about it. I didn’t die once from lack of thermal
energy while playing the game.
Between fighting humans and fighting Akrid, the time spent with the game taking
on the Akrid is a lot more fun. The AI for your human enemies is just a notch or
two above brain dead. Most of the time they’ll simply stand around taking an
occasional shot at you as if they are just trying to kill a little time while
waiting for you to pick them off one by one. Sometimes they take a position
behind cover, but then they won’t do anything after that. You don’t even need to
bother killing them all as the game only cares that you get to the end of the
path to trigger the mission’s boss battle. Your human enemies will often have a
few guys in Vital Suits – or, VS, the game’s name for mechs – but even these
aren’t that much of a danger to you. When I get a hold of a VS I go at the enemy
with the triggers squeezed tightly, but each time I face an enemy VS it is
content to level the occasional potshot at me. As if all this didn’t make things
easy enough, the game will autotarget enemies for you. You don’t even need to
aim straight at them – the game will often assume that you meant to aim at enemy
anyway, so that’s where it may as well redirect your gunfire.
