Looking For Epic Adventure? Find The Lost Planet...

By Will Barker

Welcome to the Lost Planet - thermal lederhosen not included

One of the beetle-like foes you'll face: their weak spot is their tail, which is seldom exposed

This is one of the many VS suits on offer, taking on one of the larger airborne Akrids

Boasting a pair of big boomsticks - shotgun and gattling gun - this VS is letting rip with all its got

This fella is one of the largest enemies in the game, and almost impossible to defeat. Almost....

A pair of assault Vital Suits form the rear guard for some NEVEC troopers

And this is the GAB-25M Vital Suit, which is more of a tank that transforms into this spider bot thing, and it's a full-on war machine of terror

How do you find the Lost Planet? It's not easy... First, you must believe in the Lost Planet and, second, you must be able to fit a Tabasco-sodden tennis ball in your mouth. Indeed, this is no cake walk. 

And then you must invent a vessel capable of faster-than-light travel and possibly even an organic waste recycler to keep you alive.

Barring that, you could just waltz down to a game shop and buy this Capcom game. It's also called Lost Planet, and this made-in-Japan game is, quite simply, a brilliant title.

Not since I first played Ecco the Dolphin on the Megadrive (Genesis), Secret of Mana on the SNES, and other ground breaking games like Halo on the Xbox and Final Fantasy VII on the PSX and Grand Theft Auto on the PC have I felt so keen to drop everything and leave work, family and friends to get back to my luxury penthouse apartment and widescreen high-definition LCD television to continue my epic adventure brimming with Vital Suit goodness.

Without getting too bogged down in the details just yet, the gameplay is sublime - combining on-foot and mechanised robot (Vital Suit) combat - the graphics are superlative and the storyline more poignant than an episode of 'When Animals Attack'.

Though I do have reservations about Lost Planet's shelf life - there are only 12 single player missions - the fact of the matter is that Lost Planet is the kind of game (a bit like Halo 2) where it is quite joyous to play over and over again.

I've already beaten the game on Normal difficulty (Easy is a bit too simple), and I'm currently battling my way through the game on Hard difficulty, and I've gotta say it, this game is almost better the second time through.

But what is Lost Planet? Well, it's something you need if you're a gamer of a decent pedigree and something you should try to get hold of, even if you have to sell your step-dad's rare fish collection on Ebay. 

It's also a third-person shooter with a stunning visual aspect and a beautifully integrated story.

It's true, the game is a joy to play, whether on foot taking out evil NEVEC soldiers with your shotgun, or piloting the many and various VS (Vital Suit) mechanoids and taking down building-sized aliens with the massive ordnance available to you.

If you like heaps of weapons, colossal explosions, massively massive enemies that can absorb an incredible amount of punishment before being rendered inert, and some of the coolest mechanoid designs since Macross/Robotech, then you will certainly enjoy this game.

But before I go further, the story:

The plot is an integral part to the game, and all of the cut-scenes are carried out with the polygon-based game engine, and it works well, and looks grouse, largely because the graphics engine in this game is simply amazing, stellar, and grandiose.

In the far future, humankind is ready to spread it's wings and leave the comforts of its home planet, Earth, which revolves around Sol, a small star in a remote area of the known universe. So, space ships are built and planets are colonised.

One of the many planets chosen (E.D.N III) for colonisation is settled, despite it's frozen environment. Understandably, most of the infrastructure is built underground. Alongside something previously unknown... 

Cue spooky/suspenseful orchestral tune.

It turns out a strange alien race has been existing within the planet for millennia. Called the Akrid, these horrific insectoid aliens do a lot of killing and, for more than two decades, E.D.N III is forgotten, abandoned.

However, it is later discovered that the powerful Akrid have evolved a special kind of thermal energy (called T-Eng in the game) to survive, and it's not long before the tenacious humans return to the Lost Planet for an all-out war to harvest this rich new power source, which is left behind in the dead bodies of the Akrid.

You play Wayne, or Wazza as I like to call him, and in the first mission of the game - a thinly disguised but very enjoyable tutorial - you witness your father being belly-flopped by Green-Eye, one of the largest and most deadly Akrid ever spotted.

Wayne is lucky to survive, and wakes up after being rescued from his battle-damaged Vital Suit in a strange place, with a strange new plate grafted onto his body. He was rescued by some friendly snow pirates, and from here on in, Wayne basically helps out his saviours by clearing out Akrid infestations, while trying to piece together his shattered memories.

This third-person shooter (using an above the shoulder camera) is instantly captivating thanks to the spell-binding visuals that greet you. Never before (Gears of War, maybe) have I been so truly absorbed in the way a game looks, but it plays quite nicely too. There's a touch of Capcom's arcade heritage that seeps through, giving the game that quintessential 'pick-up-and-play' feel, with responsive controls and good physics.

Wayne can shoot his machine gun, throw grenades, jump, crouch and he also has a grappling hook, which totally rules. The grappling hook comes in handy during online multiplayer bouts for a quick getaway, but is just as useful in the single-player missions, especially when trying to avoid other snow pirates and some of the larger and more agile Akrid creatures.

Your target reticle will highlight green when you can grapple onto something, and then when it bites into a concrete building wall or even the plate-like hide of a large Akrid enemy, you're winched in towards your destination at high speed. 

Wayne can also lower himself down cliff edges with the grappling hook, and it's really cool just swinging as you abseil down from scaffolding, showering red hot machine gun death upon hapless enemies below, who are sometimes too slow to realise what's just befallen them.

All told there are more than 20 hand-held weapons on offer, from the aforementioned machine gun, to the shotgun, the energy gun, plasma rifle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and the list goes on. The weapons are very well balanced, and there was never one weapon that I'd always horde; even the energy weapons which have unlimited ammo have their flaws (rate of fire). And following Halo logic, you can only carry two hand-held weapons at a time, along with a belt of grenades, of which there are also half a dozen varieties ranging from the standard fragmentation type, to plasma grenades, sticky grenades and so on.

Sneaking around on foot is a lot of fun, and even first-person shooter fans will appreciate the precision and accuracy of the controls. For instance, the larger Akrid are covered in thick organic carapace armour and often have a weak point that must be exploited, but getting too close when travelling on foot can be painful. Often fatally so. Ergo, a long-range salvo of machine gun burst fire can often weaken them, enabling some close range grenade damage to finish off the job.

I should also talk about T-Eng. This is the life-blood of the Akrid, and is also the stuff that dribbles out of their cloaca when you kill them, and your thermal suit converts the energy into heat to keep you alive. The thing is, being a very cold and unforgiving planet, your suit consumes an inordinate amount of T-Eng, which means if you play it too stealthy and just sneak around like a dirty camper, evading confrontation, you'll die of frost bite way before you die from a 20-foot razor sharp pincer through the torso.

This interesting gameplay mechanic adds a sense of urgency to proceedings, with the T-Eng counter constantly counting down, and it means you'll want to wade into new skirmishes against both human and alien with the hunger of a battle champion (which Wayne is, I suppose). If you're just exploring, and you collect no T-Eng (except from some fuel tanks and silos), you'll be dead in about three minutes.

There's a lot of exploring and killing to be done on foot, and the game's special effects make this all-the-more enjoyable. For every action, there is a reaction, someone old once said, and this holds true in Lost Planet. Shoot a enemy snow pirate with a rocket for instance, and he'll scream as the rocket hits him in the chest, filling the screen with thick smoke and debris.

Though the game's vistas are uniformly hazy and blizzard-like, when a battle intensifies you'll see all sorts of colours as the sounds and sights of weapons fire fill the region. And the sound effects are superb, with good metallic sounds for the mechanoid suits and meaty weapons effects too. And the graphics? Out of sight. They truly are beautiful, and hint at what these next gen consoles are capable of, with explosions, smoke contrails from rockets and other weapons effects displaying the kind of eye candy that would melt a squirell's cerebral cortex. As my uncle uttered when he saw it during a good-behaviour visit: "Gods teeth!"

But the game gets even better when you discover the VS, or Vital Suit that I alluded to earlier. Moving with the precision that only a master engineer could craft, the 17 different types of VS available - from basic bipedal mechs with open cockpits to fully-enclosed high tech bots, with wrist-mounted chainsaws, and two shoulder weapons - look simply gorgeous. From the moment you push the 'B' button to clamber into the cockpit, to the metal sealing all around you and watching the VS's capacitors start up, it's simply mesmerising. 

All the joints move with the heavy realism you'd expect of a carbotanium-plascrete composite, and the sounds effects that back up the visuals are just as cool. And watching someone with skill use these mechanoids against some of the larger Akrids is compelling. There are a number of Vital Suits that have jump jet capabilities, while others are just slow and tough, and some are a combination of firepower and speed. And as I mentioned earlier, anyone who is or has been a fan of Macross/Robotech, Gundam, Patlabor and other mech-inspired anime is totally gonna stab their eyeballs with AAA batteries when they see this. And how about small mechs that transform into agile snow speeders or large tanks that transform into spider bots? Hell yeah - bring that shit on!

I thought the well-paced story and innovative gameplay combined well, and though the story can be a bit confusing towards the end, anyone who watches a bit of anime should be able to wrap their head around it. There's lots of subterfuge, intrigue, politics and you begin to realise that the Akrid may not be your most dangerous foe on the Lost Planet. Never turn your back on the NEVEC Corporation troopers, that's all I'm gonna say...

There is a multiplayer aspect to the game, which I had the chance to play against mainly Japanese opponents, and it's pretty good, showing just how tight the game engine really is. It won't replace regular sessions of Rainbow Six or Project Gotham Racing 3, but the addition of the grappling hook adds another dimension to the death-match, team death-match and capture the beacon game types, and the diverse range of weapons ensures plenty of action.

I reckon this game is awesome. There are so many aspects that are not only flat-out cool to be a part of, but with all the Vital Suit mechanoid action I found the game rekindled childhood memories of watching Rick Hunter battle the Zentradi in the 1980s Robotech anime series.

One of the things that kept me intrigued during the honeymoon period with the game (the first two days - cherish them, for they won't last...) was the scope of the levels and also the size of the enemies. Barring one or two missions, the levels are huge and often take the best part of an hour to wade through. And the enemies? Even when you're piloting a VS - which are perhaps three or four times the size of a human - some of the Akrid foes simply dwarf everything else, and this gives the game a real cinematic feel. At times it really does feel like your playing your way through Starship Troopers: The Prequel.

The boss monsters have to be seen to be believed - they're uniformly gargantuan!! - and on average took me about three or four goes to beat them. Once you learn their weak spots they become a bit easier to fell, but I reckon the key to winning boss fights are more closely linked with judicious choice of weaponary and VS mechs.

The single player experience is short-lived, but it's the kind of game where I found myself gleefully turning up the difficulty and powering through the whole thing again. Shelf life could be a problem, and Lost Planet may be viewed as too short by some gamers. But this raises the old "quality over quantity" argument. Me? I'd much rather 12 super-slick, high-gloss, multi-tiered, polished and preened levels than 24 or 32 average ones that would leave me feeling empty and soulless.

And that's the feeling I get playing this game. It's very polished, very slick. One of the best game productions I've ever seen, and I think that Capcom knows all about playtesting. Where some games often have a few minor glitches here and there that let the game down, or areas in the game that really don't belong, this game is very neat and tidy. During each single player mission there are numerous'woah' occasions that will just blow you away with their sheer audacity and scope. Here's a shout out to Mister Capcom - nice work old man!

Though the Xbox 360 has been out for a while now, I finally feel that we've entered the next generation of gaming, where it's not just about awesome graphics, but the whole gamut of interactive entertainment; gameplay, graphics, story, and audio.

With games like Gears of War and now Lost Planet propping up the Xbox 360s growing games library, there's now two very good reasons to move into high-definition gaming. And I also will say that this is the first game on the Xbox 360 that has truly made me stop and verbalise thoughts such as "I've never seen anything so beautiful. Now eat a fully-charged VS turbolaser, alien infidel!"

Lost Planet isn't perfect. I wanted to give it 90%, but that would have been negligent. The single-player game is a bit short, and though multiplayer is very smooth and tightly coded and quite enjoyable, it also lacks a few game types. Everything else though, well, it's the business. And by business I mean it's shit hot.

Rent it, buy it, watch it. However you can, try and get a taste of the Lost Planet - it's one of the most immersive gaming experiences ever.

Game: Lost Planet
System: Xbox 360
Players: 1-16
Online: Yes
Developer: Capcom
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)