Lost Planet

 Capcom is one of the best third party game companies out there.  Making popular game series's such as the Mega Man and Resident Evil franchises.  While they aren't as big as they were back then, they still make some good games.  One of there games being the science fiction game Lost Planet.  This is a game that, while isn't as good as past Capcom games, is still fun to play now and again.  So let's dive right into Lost Planet.

Let's look at the story: In the future, Mankind has colonized the planet E.D.N 3, and was successful at first.  However, things turn for the worst when a hostile alien race called the Akrid start attacking the colonies and Man is forced to leave.  Humanity decides to fight the Akrid, and take E.D.N 3 back using giant mech suits call vital suits or VS for short.  While fighting the Akrid, Humanity finds a thermal energy inside the Akrid, that can be used as an energy source.  You play as Wayne, a soldier who lost his memory(but still remembers his name, and his father being killed by an Akrid).  However, Wayne was saved by a group of snow pirates, colonists that were left behind after Humanity left the first colonization of E.D.N 3.  Wayne must help the group of snow pirates destroy Akrid Hives and find the Akrid named green eyes that killed his father.  Along the way you'll fight Akrid, other snow pirates, and a group called NEVEC that want to wipe out the snow pirates.  As Wayne continues on he learns that there's more to what happened to his Father, than what he thinks happened.

Let's look at the positives:  This may sound odd, but I like the lore behind Lost Planet.  I like the idea of Humanity reaching out to the stars and colonizing, I like the VS and the thermal energy, I like the lore overall.  The combat is also great, it's your standard third person shooter, but there's two features that make this cool.  The first feature is the anchor, a special tool that allows you to reach new areas.  This is cool, because you get can hang from certain areas using your anchor and shoot away at enemies below you, making you look like an action hero in the process.  The second feature are the vital suits.  When you see one you can either take off one of the weapons on the VS and just use the weapon, or you can ride the VS and take out anyone that you encounter with ease.  There are different types of vital suits as well, ranging from basic ones, to vital suits that can double jump and and drop smoke screen.  Thermal energy is another aspect of game play that's unique.  Along with the health bar, you have a thermal energy meter that tells you how much thermal energy you have.  You need to keep collecting thermal energy and keep the meter up, because when the thermal energy meter reaches zero, you slowly lose health.  Also, thermal energy can regenerate your health if you have a lot of it.  The game play and combat is fun and entertaining.

There are a good amount of negatives as well:  First off, while I said that I liked the lore, the story, on the other hand, was okay, not really that impressive, just your typical stop evil forces plot.  The characters weren't that interesting, and were kind of generic.  We don't get much development on the characters, and there's no part of the game where you can interact with them, you only watch them in cut scenes.  The voice acting isn't really that good as well.  Maybe if they did one more take it'd work, but it just didn't work for me.  The controls are a bit off as well, they aren't game breaking, but they could fix some things in the controls.  First off, there's no sprint button, which may not seem big, but your character is slow, it'd be great to sprint.  The left and right bumpers are used to turn your character around quickly, which is nice, but you could have made the character turn quicker using the right stick, but he doesn't turns pretty slowly using the right stick.  If they didn't have the quick turn on the bumpers, they could of used on of the buttons for maybe sprinting or something.  The enemies do knock you down, which gets annoying when they spam their attacks.  Objects can be used as weapons, for example gas cans can be shot at to blow them up, which is a cool feature, but sometimes it gets frustrating.  For example, I was trying to use my anchor to reach a platform in one of the levels, but a couple of gas barrels were blocking my way and made me stop using my anchor.  So I had to shoot them, but when one blew up, the other didn't, and they were right next to each other.  They should have added a chain reaction feature in the game that would make one can blow up if in the radius of another can's explosion.  So I had to destroy each individual can.  The flaws are frustrating, but they don't ruin the game for me.

Overall, Lost Planet is a fun game, and while the characters, voice acting, controls, and some frustrating parts are annoying, it didn't ruing the game for me, and I still enjoy the lore, combat, and game play.  I recommend the Xbox 360 version to anyone interested.  Hopefully, Capcom will fix these errors in the sequels to Lost Planet.  Thanks for reading, and remember to keep ranting n' raving.