Lost Planet 2 Review

By Ned Jordan

Sequels are supposed to take a game franchise forward, building on their predecessors' strengths, shoring up their weaknesses, and adding new features to enhance the gameplay. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Lost Planet 2, a sequel that manages to be a step backward from the original game. In fact, if Lost Planet 2 was the first game in the franchise, then there probably would never have been a sequel.

E.D.N. III, the frozen planet that served as the setting for Lost Planet has begun to thaw in Lost Planet 2 to the point where steamy jungles and wind-swept deserts have started gaining a foothold on the planet. I suppose that the developers took E.D.N. III in this direction to provide for some variety in the game's environments, but in doing so they lost a lot of what made Lost Planet unique. The constant need to acquire T-Eng (thermal energy) to keep from freezing to death added an element of suspense to Lost Planet as you had to contend with the constant ticking of your death clock while fighting your way across the frozen tundra. In one of Lost Planet 2's jungles you still collect T-Eng, but it's just used to collect weapons at crates scattered across the levels and is such a non-factor in the gameplay that you wonder whether or not it's even worth the effort to go around scooping it up. You'll spend most of these levels with the T-Eng meter pegged to full so you'll probably go with 'not'.

The original Lost Planet was perfectly playable as a single player game, and although the story wasn't an entirely coherent narrative at least an attempt was made. In Lost Planet 2, there are some cutscenes between missions but there's no real story to speak of – it's more like a collection of Sci-Fi movie clips than it is a story. But if you pick up Lost Planet 2 to play as a single player game the lack of a story will be the least of your problems. The game's campaign is such a mess that it's practically unplayable in single player mode and even taking it on in four player co-op won't help much.

The first time you sit down to play the campaign you might think that you accidentally entered into the multiplayer game because the campaign starts you off in a game lobby with options to host or find a game. To play the game on your own you need to host a game and fill out the other three co-op spots with AI-controlled players – and once the mission begins you'll find that there's very little 'I' in that 'AI'. Computer-controlled teammates constantly get themselves lost or stuck somewhere, are incapable of helping you accomplish mission objectives, and have a remarkable inability to hit anything that they shoot at. You'll essentially be on your own in each mission, which can make for some frustrating times when faced with objectives clearly designed to be accomplished by a squad of human players in co-op play. Amazingly your teammates are superior to your enemies, who will often stand a few feet from you and do absolutely nothing at all as you fill them full of lead. Making a bad situation worse, the mission design is terrible. Objectives are poorly designed and even more poorly communicated to the player. You have to play through an entire level's worth of missions in one sitting or you'll be forced to start over from the beginning the next time you play because you can't save your game between missions.

Even in co-op mode things don't really improve much. You're still faced with brain-dead enemies and there's no support for player drop-in – in fact, in order to join a co-op game you've had to unlocked the level on your own first. It seems that the game was designed to be played by co-op teams of four players who all already know all of the ins and outs of each mission from the map layouts to the objectives. However, it's such a chore to play through the campaign once that very few players will want to keep revisiting the missions just to improve their scores and ratings. The game should have just stuck with co-op battles against the largest of the Arkid monsters that inhabit E.D.N. III instead of the ridiculous data post enabling sequences and similar busy-work objectives and fights against one goofy AI-controlled pirate faction after another that are served up by the campaign.

Multiplayer fares better than the game's campaign mode, but it has its own set of annoyances. Multiplayer modes include the standard death match modes (here called Elimination and team Elimination), a capture the flag variant called Akrid Egg Battles, a conquest mode (Data Post Battle), and a unique Fugitive mode. In this last mode a couple of players are the 'fugitives' and the remainder of the players are the 'hunters', with the fugitives' goal being to avoid death at the hands of the hunters. It might sound a bit one-sided, but it's actually one of the more enjoyable modes in the game.

You can look past some of the multiplayer game's minor annoyances such as an odd control layout, a grappling hook that has a very short reach and a mysterious set of rules as to what it can attached to, and the ridiculous number of Circle button presses it takes to capture a data post, but there are other balance and design issues that will keep anyone but the most diehard Lost Planet fans from playing multiplayer for long. Many of the VS (Vital Suit) mechs available in the game feel like they could have used some more tweaking on the design board, suffering from rate of fire and maneuverability issues (including an inexplicably floaty jump mechanic). Plasma grenades stun their victims for so long that they may as well just kill them instantly rather than making them impotently stare at the screen while they're filled full of lead. Probably most problematic of all is the endemic spawn-camping in the game. Nothing kills multiplayer fun faster than being caught in an endless spawn and die cycle.

The single player/co-op campaign is pretty much hopeless, and the multiplayer game has its moments but overall is weighed down too much by a number of balance and design issues. Lost Planet 2 is a disappointing sequel, and there are too many other, better options out there to warrant a visit to E.D.N. III.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 59%.You're better off leaving this planet lost.