The following isn't the sort of comment you should expect to read with great frequency in these so proudly geeky pages. Don't judge us by it, please. OK, here goes. This game would be better without robots. Better. Without. Robots. (Cries.)
The realisation that big mech suits are partially responsible for holding this console-ported third-person shooter back from greatness was a suckerpunch to the heart, akin to that first time I was told Batman wasn't real. They're not bad robot suits per se - it's just that their inclusion and increasing prevalence as the game wears on drags Lost Planet away from its initial, promising, er, promise of stalking aliens in the snow.
Remember The Thing? No, the game of the movie, not the John Carpenter film everyone quotes that sweary line from. Not a classic, but a fascinating exercise in balancing shooting space monsters with the environmental challenges of Arctic conditions.
Initially, Lost Planet hints that it's going to attempt something similarly interesting, but on a grander and poppier scale. Health and heat are bound into one gauge (thermal energy, or 'T-ENG'), so sub-zero climes and giant beclawed pulsating things alike make something of a combined threat.
Stomping through thigh-deep drifts, seeing your T-ENG trickle away even as snow impressively builds over your character's body, fending off monsters sporadically erupting from the ground... this is all atmospheric stuff.
The robotic Vital Suits (VS) themselves are far from invincible, but do offer a wee bit of safety from these chilly hazards. When you're wearing one, the game twists from survival to assault, and it's that latter mode that shows up the warts-and-all of the crude combat model.
This is a shooter made originally for the sluggish Xbox 360 gamepad, and it shows. You'll feel little satisfaction from making a good kill, as the high accuracy of a mouse makes it too straightforward. Bad news in a game this short - six to eight hours depending on your chosen difficulty setting (there is multiplayer, true, but it's forgettably generic).
Being able to burn through swathes of foes thanks to your mad mouse-sniper skills means this is definitely mere elevenses as shooters go. Especially as every level exists primarily as a prelude to a boss fight. Most of these bosses are the alien Akrid, a species that somehow managed to chase humanity off this planet despite sporting honking great glowing weak spots.
It's hard to feel threatened by some screen-high armoured slug when it has effectively got a bullseye symbol and 'Shoot me here!' painted on it. In fact, it's deeply patronising.
As the game wears on, the powerful but clunky VS mechs grow in prominence, the sprawling outdoor locations are more frequently replaced with corridor-based indoor bits, and the tedious, overblown plot overwhelms all else. It becomes just another game with a targeting reticule and health bar, and that first, sweet promise of Alien V: Bit Nippy Out, Innit? vanishes utterly.
So, why 70%? Mostly, it's brief enough and silly enough that it never stops being dumb, no-strings fun. Even when your VS becomes capable of barely-steerable flight and unbearably slow-to-recharge energy swords, y'know, it's still a flying robot with swords. Also, a generically Xboxian art style aside, it often looks fantastic, the motion blur and haze of snow especially.
Yes, Lost Planet is the first DirectX 10 game, but only in the sense of what technology it happens to be rendered with, not what that technology is capable of. So it looks equally amazing in DirectX 9. The in-engine cutscenes, though total gibberish, have a level of detail you'll be stunned your PC can achieve.
In six months time, none of that will matter, but during summer 2007 at least, it'll make you hug your PC with glee.
Extremely bad review, did the reviewer actually play this game or read the gamespot/ign review?, no mention of: 1. Cannot redifene keys using extra mouse buttons instead of keys, redefining keys only supports alphanumberic keys. 2. Inverting the Y axis( needed for a gamepad, well mine anyway ) inverts the mouse 3. No F5 quick save, performance suffers on my rig with a 7800GTX( i have Core 2 6400@3.3Ghz, 4Gig Ram, evga680i, Xfi ) and i got to the first boss and had to kill him playing at 14FPS simply because i couldnt save or change the settings to get a better FPS 4. When you redefine keys, the controls that pop up telling you the key to use shows the initial setting and not the new key 5. When you get into mechs, it does not tell you what keys are what, only the stupid XBox controller keys, how stupid is that? i spend most of my time pressing keys randomly to see if i can get something to work 6. The 'bug' that requires your internet connection to be up always when playing in Single Player mode, if your connection goes down, the game quits straight away, no retry, no warning, no save. And you have to start the whole level all over again from scratch 7. The game also has sporadic crashes, in my full 2 hours play, ive replayed the 1st level 3 times due to it closing the game on disconnects, the 2nd level died once on disconnect, then when i replayed, got to the end of the second level it crashed 8. Performance sux on anything other than an 8800, those of us with older DX9 only cards need to run on low settings and low resolutions 9. Multiplayer is useless, you can never find any online games and if you do you cant connect to them 10. Multiplayer server browser is terrible and doesnt allow for dedicated servers, hence the MP side of this( if it worked ) will go the way of RB6: Vegas whereby nobody plays( seeing as it uses the same crappy console port game room system ) 11. Also, not the games fault but NVidia are spending all their time optimizing the 8x00 drivers for DX9/10 on vista and not optimizing the 7 series or older on Vista, so theres a huge performance difference between running the game on DX9 in Vista and XP using one of these cards while theres not much difference using an 8x00 on XP or vista
The game should have been called Lost Patience, when running, the game is a good brainless blast, but i wouldnt recommend this disaster to my worst enemy, its been released half finished
it probably doesn't mention those things cause it would be the most boring review ever, there trying to sell magazines after all...
lol, no of course not, i was only mentioning the issues( not expecting them to be all in the review like that ), its just that the fact that there are issues wasnt mentioned and thats what the reader wants to hear, not just all the flowery stuff
Had Lost Planet for my 360 and it bored me to death.Stopped playing it shortly after the worms stage as it was a souless pointless excuse for a game.Can't see how the PC version would change this.
Funny thing is there isn't anything you can really put your finger on regarding why this games lacks but, if all games ended up as sleep inducing as LP then i'd be out of gaming for good.Everything is done well enough (apart from the stupidly typical cheesy guff)and it's a 6 maybe 7 out of ten but you will regret wasting time on this.
Extremely bad review, did the reviewer actually play this game or read the gamespot/ign review?, no mention of: 1. Cannot redifene keys using extra mouse buttons instead of keys, redefining keys only supports alphanumberic keys. 2. Inverting the Y axis( needed for a gamepad, well mine anyway ) inverts the mouse 3. No F5 quick save, performance suffers on my rig with a 7800GTX( i have Core 2 6400@3.3Ghz, 4Gig Ram, evga680i, Xfi ) and i got to the first boss and had to kill him playing at 14FPS simply because i couldnt save or change the settings to get a better FPS 4. When you redefine keys, the controls that pop up telling you the key to use shows the initial setting and not the new key 5. When you get into mechs, it does not tell you what keys are what, only the stupid XBox controller keys, how stupid is that? i spend most of my time pressing keys randomly to see if i can get something to work 6. The 'bug' that requires your internet connection to be up always when playing in Single Player mode, if your connection goes down, the game quits straight away, no retry, no warning, no save. And you have to start the whole level all over again from scratch 7. The game also has sporadic crashes, in my full 2 hours play, ive replayed the 1st level 3 times due to it closing the game on disconnects, the 2nd level died once on disconnect, then when i replayed, got to the end of the second level it crashed 8. Performance sux on anything other than an 8800, those of us with older DX9 only cards need to run on low settings and low resolutions 9. Multiplayer is useless, you can never find any online games and if you do you cant connect to them 10. Multiplayer server browser is terrible and doesnt allow for dedicated servers, hence the MP side of this( if it worked ) will go the way of RB6: Vegas whereby nobody plays( seeing as it uses the same crappy console port game room system ) 11. Also, not the games fault but NVidia are spending all their time optimizing the 8x00 drivers for DX9/10 on vista and not optimizing the 7 series or older on Vista, so theres a huge performance difference between running the game on DX9 in Vista and XP using one of these cards while theres not much difference using an 8x00 on XP or vista
The game should have been called Lost Patience, when running, the game is a good brainless blast, but i wouldnt recommend this disaster to my worst enemy, its been released half finished
You must have a different game. Or your comp is broken. If you were running at 14fps the game would have stopped. It stops at anything below 15fps and tells you to change settings.
Nvidia have released new Beta drivers to iprove performance with this game.
The control for the robots do appear in both pad and board configs.
This runs on my system p4 (3.0) Geforce 6600 (256mb Pci-e) and 1Gb 660mhz Corsair Ram ok with lowish settings, but it still looks great.
Most of your complaints seem to be based on how the game doesnt work with your specific set up (/on high detail). It wasn't made just for you Plus there's no quick save to make it harder! Call of duty series anyone? Halo? Resident Evil?
The Multiplayer problems are indeed true though and the game is fun and pretty but thats about it, the VS's are overused
I don't think it's half finished, it's just Capcoms usual b******s conversion work.
You must have a different game. Or your comp is broken. If you were running at 14fps the game would have stopped. It stops at anything below 15fps and tells you to change settings.
No, PC is fine, synthetic benchines are ~5700 in 3dmark06 and ~9500 in 3DMark05, i think that the game stopping at <15FPS is only when you change settings and you start back in i.e. a new level, mine was running that low at the end of first levels boss
Nvidia have released new Beta drivers to iprove performance with this game.
Which ones? they removed the 162.15s dues to issues
The control for the robots do appear in both pad and board configs.
I honestly did not see this at all and i checked several times, i meant the screen that appears when you first hop in?
This runs on my system p4 (3.0) Geforce 6600 (256mb Pci-e) and 1Gb 660mhz Corsair Ram ok with lowish settings, but it still looks great.
Wowzers, on Vista i have to run mine at widescreen otherwise it looks terrible so minimum is 12xx x 800 with absolutely everything on low with HDR on
Most of your complaints seem to be based on how the game doesnt work with your specific set up (/on high detail). It wasn't made just for you Plus there's no quick save to make it harder! Call of duty series anyone? Halo? Resident Evil?
Not really looking for high detail and i was playing it on vista, XP seems much better but i only recovered my XP install yesterday after Vista install fecked it up. What i ment with the save game was if theyre releasing it with the will die anytime the net connection goes down they could have least saved the position so you dont have to restart the level all over again
The Multiplayer problems are indeed true though and the game is fun and pretty but thats about it, the VS's are overused
I agree, i like brainless shooters, just too many issues, ive only played it for 2 hours in total due to thie issues, got a crach though to remove steam and the net disconnect bug, so might try it again on XP
I don't think it's half finished, it's just Capcoms usual b******s conversion work.
Agreed, if enough complain though when Devil May Cry 4 comes out it might actually be worthy of a place on the PC and i hope that will be decent but i expect it to be another half baked port
the controls and everything were pretty much left like the XBOX 360 and no work was done to allow the PC user to adjust settings, which is the beauty of PC games is being able to adjust things the way you want
The interface was laggy, the sound was bleh and the game was overall not that exciting, and I hated have to POWER UP! just to keep alive
For me, the only hurdle in getting the game to run was that it needed you to have a steam account to play, so I had to go grab that. I experienced no other problems whilst running it @1440x900 on XP with all settings at max, except AA which was turned off. Performance was ok apart from the occasional dip below 15 fps, with a C2D 6600, 2GB, ATI 1900XT 256mb.
I thought it had a promising start with the beautiful cinematic intro rendered entirely in game. I slightly disagree with the reviewer; I have seen worse game storylines
But I totally agree that the in door combat against human opponents is too easy on the PC, they literally just stand there waiting to get shot, the only difficulty left was battling those large robot suits, and they become easy once you learn to keep some rockets / sticky mines spare all the time.
But the outdoor fights against the aliens were actually quite fun, and they are definately the memorable, defining moments of this game. Especially the bosses.
I think it is perfectly fine for the aliens to have brightly visible orange weak spots. Most FPS players know to shoot for the head for maximum damage anyway, so what's so patronising about letting players choose to shoot for most damage? I think it's a nice addition that adds to the gameplay, especially when you're rewarded with thermal energy for shooting those parts.
The game's okay if you don't expect an epic storyline, just enjoy the level of detail put into the graphics and the memorable alien encounters.
Edit: And the developers could have spent a bit more time to adapt the controls for the PC. Or at least just take down the XBOX controller graphics, lol...
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Plus there's no quick save to make it harder! Call of duty series anyone? Halo? Resident Evil? 
