Okay Geek Farm
PS3 Review - Lost Planet 2
Alex Tretrop
I have one question to ask: ”How did this happen?” The original Lost Planet had flaws but it was still a very entertaining game, but it’s sequel, Lost Planet 2, has so little entertainment in a sea of problems that it drives you insane. It has a horrible and nonsensical storyline, gameplay that seems so bad that they knew it was going to make people angry, and irredeemable campaign and competitive multiplayer components that have any respectable player running from this game. I almost feel sorry for anyone who picked this up!
Story
Lost Planet 2 returns you to the world of EDN III, but you’re now put into the shoes of various factions of a warring Pirates, like the new Jungle Pirates, or the familiar Snow Pirates who were the enemies from the first game, and sees you switching factions fairly regularly throughout the game. This brings up a problem in the form of character development, with no characters giving themselves even a shred of believability. They basically only exist in the context of giving you obvious orders like “Destroy the Generator” or “Capture this Area,” taking away any interest you had in these characters.
The main reason for this issue is that it’s such a multiplayer experience that they hadn’t bothered to put any actual player characters in. Instead you play as some customizable pirate that never talks, making him look laughably silly, especially when dawning some of the stranger gear you can unlock. Trust me when I say that Lost Planet 2 goes even lower than I originally expected it to go.
Gameplay
The biggest problem of all with Lost Planet 2 is the gameplay. Oh man, I could talk for a while on how bad it feels, so let’s get right into it. LP2, as mentioned before, is a multiplayer experience to the core. When you start a Campaign, unless you manually go and change it yourself, will always create an online lobby by default, assuming you have an internet connection. The strange thing about this is that, say you feel like playing offline for whatever reason, maybe your internet is down or none of your friends are on or maybe just maybe you don’t have any friends, the game turns the missing players into fake bots, going so far as to giving them fake Gamertags or PSN Gamecards that, honestly, just to add to the confusion. Although strange, this wouldn’t be a problem if the AI was decent, right? Can you take a guess about what I’m going to say next? Well, if you guessed that your CPU partners are utterly horrible and useless you’d be right! Lost Planet 2’s AI is pretty terrible and considering that you need some real help to even attempt the harder levels, this is pretty disgraceful. Even worse, since you all have a “shared lives” type of system, whenever one of your idiotic computer allies goes down, you get penalized for their mistakes. Lame!
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately. In Lost Planet 2 you do a lot more of what you did in the original, namely mowing down pirates in the face, but the shooting doesn’t feel like it’s evolved at all. Gears of War and Mass Effect have done the third person shooter way better by making the experience feel smoother and more precise, and if compared to the relative choppiness of Lost Planet 2’s weapons it’s almost no contest. On the brightside, Lost Planet 2 has a nice variety of weapons that, with a few exceptions, all feel fairly powerful - the shotgun for example, as well as appropriately feeling like War-Machine when riding within one of these giant hunks of armour.
Moving on, Lost Planet 2 also comes equipped with a competitive online mode which seems like it’s really trying hard to be fun, and it definitely seemed fun, but it’s brought down by a ton of technical issues with the way its set up. The one that stood out for me as the biggest flaw was when I was playing a Free for All game. So I spawned at the only available spawn point, getting ready to hunt down my enemy when I’m suddenly killed by someone behind me. See where this is going? There was only one spawn point available, in a free for all match. Needless to say, I never made it out of that spawn zone for about half the game! The problems with the multiplayer stem from the annoyances from campaign in that none of the guns feel particularly effective against other people. Though one positive I have to say about the multiplayer is that there are some mechs that take advantage of teamwork, adding extra firepower if your friends grab a seat, which can be devastating in the game if you play well - yeah, I know they’re also in the campaign but it just feels more satisfying when you’re on an online beating down other players.
Lost Planet 2 also suffers from a few problems that make it feel like it’s behind the times; Why can’t you fire a wire from your grapple hook in midair? It takes forever for you to get up after your knocked down, even after they fixed it from an even longer animation from the first game.
Although I could go on for a few more paragraphs about how terrible Lost Planet 2’s gameplay is, I’ll finish off this section by adding the icing on the cake, the piece de resistance: Whenever you run out of lives in the campaign, do you go back to a checkpoint? No, of course you don’t, I mean that would make too much sense. Instead, LP2 kicks you back to the beginning of the freaking level! Considering that you could potentially lose 30 minutes to up to an hour of time because of this. This was one the reasons I really felt like I never want to touch this game again.
Visuals/Audio
Finally, something positive to say about this game! If there’s one thing that’s fairly hard to complain about it’s Lost Planet 2’s visuals, especially the enemy Akrid models which can be huge and menacing. That’s not to say the environments don’t look good either because they definitely all look very appealing and “pretty” throughout the game. Lost Planet 2 never fails to bring in some gigantic boss type enemy that looks impressive and gets you pumped to take down… even if taking them down isn’t very fun!
Audio is also fairly well made, with some excellent music to complement the game, even I felt that they could have been played a bit more often or been a bit longer to last through the tediously long levels. The characters on the other hand, don’t fare so well. I never really cared for anyone because it felt so played out and pointless the dialogue. It doesn’t help that some of the voice actors were terrible as well but there are some fairly good voice actors, if they were a bit underused.
Second Opinion and Final Thoughts (by Ricardo Trejo)
It really sounded like Alex absolutely hated this game, and I can see why when some of his points are quite valid. But I’m going to have to disagree with him. For me, Lost Planet 2 was at least a rental because it although it did suck the big one on a couple of things, it still felt like a much grander adventure this time around. And when you’ve got yourself a hardcore team of players online who are willing to put in the team work, well, the whole game comes together in a way that not many titles do nowadays. Controlling my character was a breeze, and the shooting mechanics were fluid in my opinion. I do wish that there would’ve been an auto-lock on though, somewhat to like how Red Dead Redemption offers (review coming next week). I’m not saying that I couldn’t aim or anything, but an auto-aim might’ve picked up the pacing of the game, especially when doing a solo campaign and you’re AI units are complete morons. Though one thing I will agree with Alex on is the way the game makes you start over from the beginning of a chapter after running out of lives. This blows because each chapter is made out of sub-chapters, and if you die you have to do all those sub-chapters all over again, which is a pain in the neck, especially if you died trying to figure out how to take down an Akrid.
The Akrid, like in the first game, truly make the game what it is, and fighting the endless barrage of the same enemies over and over again is just the progress in-between to get to your glowing alien friends. Which leads me into my next point that the game in itself isn’t a masterpiece in terms of eye candy, but it isn’t sub-par. The Akrid are well designed beasts that really cause a presence when on screen; they’re menacing and dangerous, and sorta make me feel the way I did when I had to fight a boss in Demon’s Souls. But despite how awesome the creatures look, the world of Lost Planet 2 doesn’t match that same grandiose setting when it comes to how it looks. From the environments to the characters you play and fight against, everything just feels and appears so generic. It’s not going to win any awards for graphical appeal but it looks great enough to play without any major complaints. I don’t want to sound like I’m griping over a game that doesn’t have ground breaking visuals, but rather what I’m saying is that this type of style would’ve wow’d us when this console generation launched, and thus it’s nothing special to look at right now.
And when I tried the multiplayer game I wasn’t met with any technical issues mentioned by Alex, and maybe it’s because of that that I had a more fun experience.
Overall, the game felt like a bigger adventure than the first game but not technically “better”. Sure, it had its moments but there never was a time where I was stunned by what I had to do in a mission, or what was asked of me when battling a towering Akrid. The core formula of the first game was completely redesigned and this may work for some and not for others, but that all depends on what type of player is sitting down with LP2. For me it was quite an experience, however, I did come in expecting more of the original only to be surprised by a game that wasn’t anything like the way I remembered its predecessor. Alex may not have appreciated what was intended to be enjoyed in this iteration in the series but seeing that he and I are split on how good/bad this game was, we’re just going to have to leave it up to you to decide.
