To put it simply, Lost Planet is an incredibly awesome game. From the well planned and executed single player campaign to the never-ending online battles, it’s one of those rare games where you feel like you got every penny’s worth and then some.


A taste of the action.

Things start off mildly slow in the single player game but don’t let that fool you as the journey you embark on in the 11 levels of Lost Planet is something special. Using the left analog stick to move and the right analog stick to look around you’ll find movement to be a bit sluggish at first. Once things start crowding the screen and assaulting you from all angles though you’ll start to get a feel for just how good Lost Planet does 3rd person action. To make the slow movement a little faster in times of crisis you can of course also hit the left or right shoulder buttons to swing you around 90 degrees left or right. It’s an incredibly neat feature that really makes you feel that much more in control of the situation.

As you run through the deep snow you’ll occasionally run across weapons and thrown explosives you can pick up. You can only hold two weapons at a time and one kind of thrown explosive. Using the X button to swap between weapons you can then use the B button to swap the currently equipped weapon for the one on the ground. Yellow highlighted weapons are normal human weapons and blue highlighted weapons are Mech weapons. Amazingly you can actually pick up and lug around the giant Mech weapons. With a Mech weapon equipped you can either fire it off, drop it, or even attach it to a Mech that you are close to. For that matter you can even grab weapons directly off of Mechs. It’s an incredibly cool system that’s just fresh enough to make you say wow.


Blasting some flying Akrid.
With weapon in hand it’s time to take down some of your initial threats which are the nasty creatures known as the Akrid which invest the planet. Some fly, some come out of the ground, and some just wander around looking for prey. They all look like radioactive bugs of the worst kind and you’ll have to take them out to survive. According to the storyline, humans discovered that the Akrid contain a kind of liquid energy that if harvested can empower machines, weapons, and humans alike. So if you kill something it will leave a puddle of red goo which will increase your T-ENG meter if walked over. And this is where we talk about the innovative and effective health system.

When you get hit hard your health meter drops. Run away from the danger and let your T-ENG meter decrease rapidly and refill your health meter. Pick up a laser rifle and shoot it off a few times and watch the T-ENG meter decrease even faster. Get in a Mech, boost into the sky, and fire off some weapons to see that T-ENG meter fly to zero. How cool is that? T-ENG essentially enables you as a life form, as a mech, and serves as ammo for some weapons. Once the T-ENG hits zero though you can’t drive a Mech, you can’t shoot those rifles, and your life will not recover. Thankfully, as I stated earlier, killing Akrid can refill that meter pretty quickly along with barrels that ooze it when you shoot them. In times of intense damage though, even the T-ENG can’t save you. If you get hit multiple times in a row with something like a high powered rocket it will force your health below zero killing you.