Lost Planet: Extreme Condition PC

Everything Else

You may be asking by this stage; ‘just what else is there?’ Well, there’s a fair bit.

Multiplayer for one makes a welcome addition to the set-up, delivered in the ‘Online Battle’ mode that is set up via Steam. Steam, if you haven't already gathered, is required to run and register the game.

Oddly though, the lobby system doesn’t take advantage of a decent interface to select matches from and instead gives a very console-y lobby which forces players to either specify very certain criteria to search by in order to find any matches, or to let the system automatically find you a quick match.

The whole system can be VAC secured though using Valve’s anti-cheat system, which suggests the system has been optimised somewhat for Steam, therefore making the awful interface more of a mystery.

Players can check the experience of their enemies by monitoring the level of other players, which is presumably based on the number of kills they make. This is tracked in the records facility under the main menu. There’s also a selection of different models available, more of which become unlocked through playing the game, and choice of different game modes; fugitive, elimination, team elimination and post grab.

None of the game modes are very innovative; elimination modes are basically deathmatch with a new name, while fugitive is a player-hunt and post grab is similar to catch the flag. But with data posts, whoop-de-do.


The multiplayer is, as it is with most third person action games which try to do multiplayer, a maxed affair and highly dependent on who you’re playing, but in our experience it wasn’t really worth devoting too much attention to and suffered from similar flaws to the single player campaign in that it was too easy with a mouse and keyboard.

Lost Planet really gives the continued impression that you should play it with a 360 controller, which kind of defeats that point. It even goes as far as to include handy tips in the tutorial which reference the 360 controller controls directly, constantly saying “B : Back” when the game knows that you’ve mapped it to RMB.

Conclusions

So, can Lost Planet escape the usual stereotype of being a console port with a Japanese origin and make a successful translation to a new platform and audience?

Kind of.


From a technical standpoint, Lost Planet is incredibly impressive as it offers not only some excellent visuals, but also gives a large number of enemies on screen at once and some monstrously huge bosses without a hint of framerate loss or sacrifice.

But on the other hand, the story is so bad that Tim walked away to laugh about it half-way through the first cutscene and even I, an English graduate with novel aspirations and a firm belief in giving in awful books a try, started tuning out some of the dialogue due to sheer boredom. Really, we can’t emphasise how awful the story is in the game.

So, good graphics but bad story? It’s like Far Cry all over again and it looks like the gameplay is going to be the deciding factor.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is a mixed bag. Running ‘n’ gunning is excellent in small bursts, but when that’s all there is to the game it can quickly become fatiguing and tedious. The wow factor is greatly reduced too by the fact that players are introduced to the massive Green Eye boss in the prologue to the game, which would mean the game needs a strong story-led narrative to make players want to repeat the encounter.

In case you’ve not ready anything else but the last sentence in this review; I’m not too impressed with the plot.


In small bursts though, Lost Planet is good enough to keep our attention and we’ll no doubt return to it for some idle playtime while we eat our sandwiches (Ham and Lettuce today, since you asked), but that’s probably as much replay as Lost Planet will see from us. The game just doesn’t rise above average in terms of gameplay, thanks to a lack of re-balancing for mouse-wielding gamers and a lack of extra content or cohesive narrative.

Lost Planet has an audience, there’s no doubt about that and that audience will no doubt enjoy every moment they spend with Wayne and Gale (really, new names please), but for the majority of gamers Lost Planet just doesn’t warrant the full retail price tag or the hassle of downloading and setting up a Steam account if you don’t already have one. Find it again in a few months when the price is down to a tenner and reconsider it then.