I have never encountered a game as noncompliant as Lost Planet 2. With no internet connection present, I had to tell it repeatedly that I wanted to play a single player campaign at which point it asked me how many other people would be joining me. I get it Lost Planet 2, you’re intended as a cooperative experience, but your downfall is that you need more than one person playing at a time to consider you entertainment.

it’s sort of like playing a video game, only without all the fun bits.

I seem to remember Lost Planet 1 being your standard third person shooter with space marines shooting aliens. So why does Lost Planet 2 think it’s the next Left 4 Dead? If you try to play single player, the game throws a great big tantrum. When you exit a map there’s a 10 second time delay, as if all your nonexistent friends weren’t quite done looting yet. Your AI buddies all have stupid names like XXkiller52 floating over their heads. The maps have group based objectives like defending multiple capture points simultaneously even though the AI couldn’t defend a dandelion from a gentle breeze, let alone giant aliens. There is almost no penalty for death, since they don’t want the game to end if one person screws up. There’s even one level all about operating an enormous tank which requires four people working in unison across multiple decks to fire, but the AI kicks back the whole time in the break room having a smoke while you get devoured by a worm the size of a 300 foot tall, eight mile long worm.

The controls are an unresponsive mess. The zoom-to-scope function is on the D-pad and frequently nudges the night vision goggles. Night vision, by the way, is never needed as the lighting is 99% bloom and 1% genuine light sources, so night vision just outlines things in green rather than making anything more visible.

Lost Planet 2 is a fan of over generalizing. I get the feeling the dialogue was written long before the earliest concept sketches came out of the art department. Every alien in the game is called an Akrid, and every big one is a Category-G. I suppose categories A through F all got killed in the last game. Every vehicle, robot, and oversized gun in the game is referred to as a VS, and they don’t even say what VS stands for. So if you’re in an enemy base and someone yells out “incoming VS” you don’t know if that means there’s a small turret around the next corner, or a three-story tall hover tank is about to blow up the whole building. Just over half way through the game someone mentions the enemy using Akrid VS’s which could literally mean anything in the game.

In fact, I think every department involved with the making of Lost Planet 2 had no connection to any other department. For example the cut scenes which depict player characters in combat always depicts the exact opposite of what you’re capable of doing in the game. In one of the first cut scenes someone uses a grappling hook to attach themselves to a giant monster and shoot it Shadow of the Colossus style. In determined indignation I tried this technique on literally every monster in the game and in every single case I shot toward the monster, glitched right through them and got trampled. Given this model, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the play testing department submitted its findings directly to the paper shredder. In another cut scene the player, wearing a SCUBA suit, swims up to a dock and shoots an enemy from underwater before surfacing. Later in that level I jump back into the water to escape enemy search lights, still wearing my SCUBA suit, and am instantly killed because apparently my character can’t swim anymore.

Aside from promoting player suicide, as though the game weren’t doing that enough already, the cut scenes completely fail to explain the plot. I was half way through the game, having played four different sets of characters, before I could tell you whether I was a pirate or a space marine and who I was fighting and why. Turns out you’re pirates fighting the military because they’re going to kill some big Akrid in the center of the planet with an orbital laser which will cause the planet to freeze over. To stop them you have to take control of the giant space laser and kill the big akrid at the center of the planet, and then it turns into a tropical paradise because apparently murder is ok when pirates do it (isn’t that always the Disney message?).

As for the interceding play, it’s sort of like playing a video game, only without all the fun bits. You shoot things and take their thermal energy, which you use to heal yourself by squeezing a magical stress ball. You die frequently but it’s ok because you can die about 7 times per level +2 for each checkpoint you’ve reached. Don’t worry about the fact that dying removes all sense of accomplishment from beating a fight because it kills the immersion and gives you the most permanent sense of failure. None of the boss fights are fun or rewarding as each is designed to kill you at least five times and frequently more. They are doable in cooperative modes but not so much single player because the AI buddies who are supposed to help you all run to one corner of the map and stand there doing nothing for minutes at a time.

I had a hard time deciding how much to resent Lost Planet 2 as it’s obvious it thinks it’s doing well the whole time, like a dog dropping a dead bird on the carpet. It has very pretty graphics and the boss battles are very big and impressive. The play length is even considerably longer than most graphically intense shooters. But no matter how you look at it, a good musical score and pretty graphics are just polish for the rest of the game, and you can’t polish shit.

Dead Weight 1\5