"Lost Planet: Extreme Condition"

I just finished Zonk's review of Lost Planet, which reminded me that I should finish my own.

In a nutshell:

After hearing such praise about this game, ("It's THE Xbox game to play after Gears!") I was excited to buy it; which I did as a personal treat on the day it came out. I brought the game home and was immediately turned off by it but vowed to play it more just in case. After two days, I put it down for a week. Then I tried it again, and put it down for a month. Then I tried it one more time and got so frustrated, I gave it to my wife so she could sell it before it loses too much of its value.

I dont have exactly the same issues as Zonk but I had the same reaction - dont waste your time.

The basic game mechanic here: die, die, die some more until that one time you dont die. It is quite possible that I just dont have the mad skillz to play this game but it felt more like punishment than fun. Even with a walkthough to tell me exactly what I should do (since the game doesnt give you much help in that regard).

What usually keeps me going is the story and finding out why things are happening, but the story here was consistently panned by others as being nonsensical so why continue? (And I do agree with Zonk that the characters are terrible.) There are a lot of mindless games out there where you shoot flashing lights that represent people, or monsters or aliens. The game may be pretty but pretty isn't enough.

Day 1

The manual starts with a story - a story that is TERRIBLE. Sheesh. Frozen but not dead?

The first mission is not friendly... I kept dying and had no idea what to do. There is a radar but no clues in it. (It took me a while to figure out the silly beacons.)

When you do die, the autosave/restart points are FAR apart. Extending the gameplay by making people repeat large sections of the game is lame.

I liked the limit of two weapons at once since that seems more realistic to me and forces decisions. However, it was a little odd that you can shoot mech-size weapons.

I found the default controls to be very slow and hard to reconfigure. For instance, the joystick was very slow to turn or aim my character. More than that, the whole UI was pretty bad. The game does not even remember that you are running with the hard drive and I had to reconfigure that every time I started the game. Weak.

There is an ingame menu system with a map but when you go to the menu system, the game does not pause. So if you are lost or need to think, you basically die if you read the messages there.

The content borrows heavily from other games and IP. There were bizzare barnacle creatures (from Half-Life) although these inexplicably spawn flying creatures. The monsters can all magically appear out of the ground, like Tremors. One of the boss monsters does this spinning thing that reminded me of Sonic the Hedgehog. Etc.

A lot of people praised the heat energy element of the game but I cant imagine why. Why does blowing up an old car produce heat energy? Heck, why do the old cars blow up in the first place? Why is every barrel filled with high explosives? That kind of silly kid stuff appeared throughout the game.

Day2

After finishing the first level the first day, I had no desire to play it again. Not a good sign. Eventually I did and it was more entertaining. At least for a while.

The characters were major stereotypes and not very appealing to me. The main chatacters are all teenagers - the blond guy, the faintly aisian lead guy, the faintly asian chic with huge tits -- all right out of every bad Japanese cartoons as was the father-figure with an EYE PATCH. Yaarr matey's! An eye patch? Was that supposed to make him seem old or tough? Sheesh. I also thought the dialog was rather poor - which is probably due to a poor story to begin with.

After killing mosters, you kill some mechs which are the best part of the game and then you kill "pirates". Pirates? The pirates are slow and dumb and I kept wondering why there would even be any pirates such a barren planet that everyone else evacuated?

Again, I was frustrated by the save points being so far apart and the fact that most of the time, I had no idea what to do or where to go. Do I run, do I fight?

Last Day

After a long break, I decided to try one last time so I picked up where I had been stuck last - some huge ice plain complete with ice wurms right out of Dune.

Needless to say, I kept dying. The wurms knew where my mech was and running to the beacons just got me killed. So I read a walkthrough which told me that there is no mystery here - just RUN RUN RUN.

Which got me as far as another beautiful babe in a cool mech. But instead of talking with her, my character immediately tries kill to her. Smoke, explosions, insanely powered laser beam. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die.

That's it for me. I sincerely hope Mass Effect is more fun for me since I am clearly out of touch with what a lot of my fellow gamers enjoy.