Story & Characters
This was a major let down. Right from the offset it seemed totally drab and uninteresting. Father and son fight bad insects (Akrid), suddenly big bad Akrid comes and kills father. Son gets hurt and becomes frozen in his VS. Years later a group of pirates rescue son. Son is now mad and wants revenge and goes all ‘Rambo’ on the Akrid until he finds the thing that killed his father.
The main character as established is called Wayne. Great, so we’ve got an Eskimo look-a-like called Wayne…it sounds out of place, and once you see him, he even looks out of place. It gets worse; the two Snow Pirates who rescue Wayne at the start are so plain and uninteresting that they drown out the storyline even more so. Luka and Rick are your rescuers, while Yuri is their leader. They’re so plain that I hardly even paid proper attention to the cut scenes. Cut scenes are meant to draw your attention but the ones in lost planet will have you switching off your brain in no time at all.
The story starts off pretty well, but goes right off track as you progress through the game. To the point where on Mission 10, I just have no idea about what is going on. The cut scenes that are played in between missions look really good in places, but are no match for the superb cut scenes that Dead Rising showered us with.
Luckily with Lost Planet, you can just ignore most of the storyline and just run and gun all the way. Cast your mind away from the plot, just jump in, and kill bugs, then really big bugs, and more bugs until you get sick of it. When you’re bored, hop into a mech and jump on little snow pirates!
Visuals/Audio
It’s quite difficult to create a sense of atmosphere, when your primary game is set in a somewhat deserted, snow covered planet devoid of human life. Lost Planet has some impressive graphics and a fairly solid engine but I feel that it isn’t shown off as much as it should have been. They could have added huge epic akrid vs snow pirates outdoor battles, but instead the most ‘large’ akrid you’ll see on one screen varies from about four to five, which is more then enough.
The wrecked abandoned settlements you’ll frequently encounter during the early levels aren’t much to look at either. The building textures are hardly anything to write home about and up close they do look quite poor but then again, this has been a desolate wasteland for hundreds of years. These early settlements are just lacking something and it would help greatly if they were better represented. It would have been better to see bits of masonry crumbling to the floor as you walked or trampled by in your VS for example, something to convey that this area has been empty for a long time.
You barely get to see your humanoid enemies up close because you’re mostly dispatching them from a distance, and if you do manage to get close, there’s just no character detail there as most of the time they’ll be wearing protective face masks.
The snow effects are really good, and as you traverse the desolate wastelands you can see footprints being left behind, as well as snow blowing across the surface of the ground. Latter levels are more impressive luckily as you head towards a volcano base and come across even more Akrids and hazardous paths. Capcom have seen fit to use some brilliant smoke effects as well as explosions both of which look and sound superb. The smoke has to be seen first hand because it really looks good, almost as good as the smoke effects in Call of Duty 3.
The Akrid’s on the other hand are this game’s saviour. They look superb and are well designed and animated, especially the huge bosses. Just wait until you see the Giant Worm or Moth as they are breathtaking to see in action. I thought to myself that things couldn’t get bigger then this as I encountered a huge arachnid boss halfway through the game, and boy was I wrong.
The audio side of things doesn’t impress much. The music is top notch and very memorable, but that’s about the best feature. In-game effects are nothing special and rather average. The weapons feel and sound like they pack a meaty punch and the VS’s have that metallic feel to them as they clunk around with their huge feet. The voice-overs just don’t anything to the game. In fact you could get away with using subtitles for the entirety of the single player campaign and playing without voice audio. The characters just don’t feel like they belong here and felt out of place.