I grabbed the demo off of XBLM yesterday. Right now, I’d say that Lost Planet serves as the perfect example of what I’ve been talking about lately. I saw the trailers for it before, thinking it looked okay, but not great. Now that I have actually played the game, I can tell you it’s pretty fun. There are two missions available. I’ve only played one, so I can’t tell if you play as opposing factions of humans or if you can play as both humans and aliens, which would be sweet. As it stands, Lost Planet is a third person shooter. It’s of the old-school variety, which I like. There are lots of insect enemies popping out of pulsating holes in the ground. If you want to stop the flow of insect baddies, you have to destroy the hole. It gives the game a Gauntlet-like sense of urgency to it. Adding to this Gauntlet theme is your ever decreasing life bar. There isn’t any documentation with the demo, but I believe this is your life support slowly draining. Why is it draining you ask? Because you’re in a frozen wasteland silly! There is also a temperature monitor on the HUD, which I think affects your energy’s rate of decline.
The gun play is standard stuff. Mildly ineffective machine guns, one-shot-kill shotguns, and the ubiquitous rocket launcher. There’s also a grapple which I didn’t get much time to experiment with. But the big daddy of them all is the chaingun wielding mech. This bad boy can jump, dash, and of course lay ruin upon the land with a big damn gun. I could swear I was also prompted to “pick up” something while using the mech, but I was forced to eject before I could find out.
The game is a lot of fun, but the demo lacks checkpoints, so I’ll have to go at it again tonight. I’ll give you a full report when I finish the whole thing.