Lost Planet 3

 

Many years ago I had played and finished Lost Planet 1 on Xbox 360. It was one of the great early games for that console and had its own style and charm. I remember it being kind of arcady and being heavy reliant on this temperature system where you must collect orange temperature drops from killed enemies or you die because your health slowly ticks down. I thought it was a pretty solid game. Lost Planet 2 was a significant departure in gameplay style in a few ways, if i can remember correctly, But years ago I also beat that. The great thing about Lost Planet 2 is that it featured a co-op ability and let you play through the whole game with a friend, so even if the game was a step down in many regards, I remember having fun just playing co-op.

Well from what I can remember, Lost Planet 3 isn't really anything similar to either of those games. For starters, strangely there is no co-op ability, despite it being present in the previous game. Already thats a really sad developer choice, what they just couldnt spare the extra cost? Dont you know more people will buy the game to play with their friend if you add co-op? I dont understand why devs do stuff like this, its bizarre, but I digress... Lost Planet 3 starts off with you being thrown in the artic tundra of I guess some far off planet, you crawl through the snow, get your pistol and fight a few insectoid enemies and already I can tell the game takes a departure from the previous games. Its not long into the game until I realized that the whole temperature system of the first game is nowhere to be found here, the game plays more like another generic third person shooter and even has a Gears of War type cover system, complete with regenerating health. Any aspects of unique gameplay design from previous Lost Planet games are gone in favor of more generic, industry standards of the time.

The premise is something about you being a part of this sort of research team stationed at some base on a planet, you're this man  away from home being sent on various dangerous tasks to traverse the enviornment mostly in your Mech, you have these semi-frequent cutscenes where you get video recordings from your wife at home saying how much she misses you and of you sending videos back and forth to her detailing the kinds of things youre doing. The writing, though, just falls flat most of the time. For the most part the story and characters arent all that interesting and nothing really happens. It's all a bit too plain and forgettable.

Very shortly into the game you get your Mech, this vehicle type thing you can jump in and out of almost at any time. Most of the game actually revolves around slowly traversing the enviornment in this thing, going onwards towards your next objective. Unfortunately this thing frankly just fucking sucks and is a total snoozefest and really boring to use. For many reasons. The game tries to be this semi-open world allowing you to mostly freely explore the map as you please, ocassionally giving you access to fast travel at specific points. The problem, however, is that the world design fucking sucks and is awful and boring. Literally, no joke, 90% of the "open world" is a straight linear hallway. Its like the entire game is hallway after hallway masquerading as if its outdoors. I've never seen anything like it. To make matters worse, the mech walks slow as all hell so for most of the game you're doing nothing but slowly clambering through these stupid fucking hallways doing NOTHING. The mech also for some reason has a radio that plays shitty pop/country music its just so bad. The game took me 9 hours to beat and I would bet atleast 5 of those hours is doing nothing but walking around these dull, linear, stupid fucking hallway sections going back and forth towards objective markers. At least half of the game if not more is spent inside this mech, its like they saw the few mech sections in previous games and thought "I know, lets make Lost Planet 3 be all about these badass crazy mechs how can we do that!?" But they couldnt come up with any good ideas on how to properly implement it, to make matters worse the 'gameplay' of the mech consists of walking around to various different switches and valves you have to frequently interact with, by doing simon says quicktime events. Or, you have these frequent 'combat' segments where you're inside the mech and are fighting these big bosses that are usually the same re-used asset of a giant crab or scorpian thing, and guess what? The 'combat' is quicktime event after quicktime event too. You just wait for the boss to attack then it says LB or RB! and you have to press the quicktime over and over doing these shitty pre-baked scripted animations and events until he dies. It just sucks, its awful. The entire mech implementation is a grueling slog and every time the game forced me back inside it I was sad. It also doesnt help that the game tries to be open world but fails miserably in making it have any sort of meaning behind it, they just did it because "Haha games are supposed to be open world nowadays this will sell more copies if we can market it as such". The UI interface is atrocious as well so when it allows you to fast-travel its a clusterfuck trying to figure out where the main objective is and how to fast travel there.

As for the on-foot combat segments and objectives, they arent much better. Mostly because the gameplay is so damn generic and plain, nothnig stands out. Its not even 'generic done well' its just medicore. None of the guns are interesting, you have a shotgun, this assault rifle, then a plasma 3 burst rifle, then some other shit I didnt even care to try out. The game is supposed to entice you to care with these upgrades and stores you can buy from, and when you kill enemies they drop orange pools of goop that somehow is supposed to be used for currency, but none of the upgrades and stores have interesting things at all. All of it just looks like useless padding. So much so that at a few points I could 'upgrade' my Mech, but all of the items on offer just seemed like irrelevant technojargon gobbledegook so I randomly just picked anything on the list because it was so uninteresting. I think a big reason why the third-person on foot combat is so boring is due to the enemy design. The whole game feels like you fight 3 different enemies. They're all some variation of some insect or mosquito. You have these dull flying mosquitos that feel pointless to even bother fighting, then some on-ground headcrab bitches that are again, just a nusance. Then you have these really stupid bigger alien enemies that hide behind cover and shoot(?) what seems like guns at you but they also sprint around the map like crazy and are generally just very tedious to fight, its not engaging or fun its just annoying and tedious. You have segments where the enemies respawn unless you destroy the spawners on the walls, but for the most part theres no real reward for fighting every last enemy you can simply run past many of the encounters. You frequently have these boss fights, maybe the first time it was kinda cool, the giant crab, but they keep reusing the same asset over and over it just becomes eye-roll like "Fuck, this shit again?". They take like 10 minutes to kill its just this annoying task of shooting all their glowing weak spots and waiting for the right animations. They must of reused the same boss fights like 10 times throughout the game.

The game has so many quicktime segments where it either feels like youre playing Simon says, or the third person shooter parts just feels like youre playing Wack-a-mole. None of it is very good. There are a few segments halfway through the game where it starts introducing these 'Survive waves of enemies' type objectives where your ship is mining for resources and you have to defend it, these were meh too because at first the UI does a bad job of making it clear what your ships repair level is , and when the objective ends. Speaking about the objective marker, you have to constantly press a button to make it appear and its this janky glitchy weird piece of shit that only updates you where to go after you step on the exact specific spot it wants you to, it sucks and is needlessly obtuse.

The graphics arent even that impressive considering the era. Yeah, some of the world and atmosphere is pretty immersive and decent, they did a decent job making you feel like youre in this artic frozen world, but again, the linear fake hallway feeling of the whole outdoors segments really just ruins any immersion. Like its quickly obvious youre just in some shitty unimaginative video game fake outdoors world with a skybox above your head masking the fact that youre just in one giant building and series of hallways. At least some of the more 'hellish' out doors areas are cool , the places with all the red glowing areas or whatever, lava places. The audio is just bog standad, except some of the guns sound impactful like the P.I.G. or whatever the hell that thing was called.

I'm really not sure if theres anything good to say about this game? I was really dreading playing it every session I booted it up, playing it for more than an hour at times almost felt physically painful of how boring and annoying the whole game was. At least towards the last quarter of the game it started to get slightly more interesting because eventful things start happening where you go through all these sorts of different story arcs and characters are dying and plot points become more interesting, then you even start fighting other Humans which really turns the game into a Gears of War clone, but you know what? That was the most fun I've had with the game. And fighting the humans only lasts for like 20 minutes. You know what? if the rest of the game had consisted of more fighting humans it would of been at least more tolerable and fun, but no, its only the last tiny bit of the game that it starts to be remotely entertaining.

For the most part the dialogue and characters are cringe inducing eyeroll shit. Like that one college kid techological geek character you meet keeps saying shit like "For the win, bro!" and being overly peppy, like who is this trying to appeal to? The game is pretty narrative focused and has lots of cutscenes and the plot tries to unravel constalty, which is about the only thing that kept the whole experience engaging. At least I could sit back and watch some shitty movie because the actual gameplay wasnt any good. The plot is just some third rate sci-fi fantasy where youre the hero of the world and you have to save everyone from the evil oppressive government NEVEC or some shit. At one point in the story you get taken in by some rebel faction thats been laying low on the planet where youre being aided by this girl, I guess it was kind of cool to explore this other faction and the whole drama surrounding outsiders or whatever. The game tries to pull this epic tearjerker climax at the end which was again, pretty eyeroll. Like yeah, no, youre not this epic drama plot with deep meaningful characters, game. But at least they tried. The game at times was an awful slog, at other times it was mildly amusing, thanks to its complete lack of character and generic third person gameplay, it at least means it IS a third person shooter action game, and I do generally like all of those, but this one just has no identity of its own anymore. The game ends on a sort of cliffhanger indicating theres going to be a next game, but I think this game sold so badly that they never made it. Lost Planet is dead?

4/10