Lost Planet 2 (The co-op experience)

Lost Planet 2 is a game that likes to constantly remind you that you need more friends. At least, friends that you can play Lost Planet 2 with. (I'm sure you're very popular and have lots and lots of friends who won't play Lost Planet 2 with you.)

Make no mistake, Lost Planet 2 feels like a game built from the ground up for multiplayer. You and three of your closest friends (well, only one other if you're playing offline) will fight not only the indigenous population of E.D.N III, the Akrid, but also other factions of colonizers for control of the thermal energy that prevents you from dying a horrible death. (That actually kinda sounds like the plot of Transformers...) The Akrid range in size from tiny bird-sized things to huge, miles long monstrosities, giving the game a great sense of scale.

The single player campaign is exactly the same as the co-op multiplayer campaign down to the loading and results screen where there are three empty slots where other players would normally be. So in reality it's more like a "four player co-op minus three" campaign. Luckily, the game lets you play with three AI-controlled characters when playing alone. And even luckier, they're actually not complete wastes of space. Sure, they might not actually kill anything for you, but they don't get in the way and can help distract some of the larger Akrid so you're not constantly getting your ass handed to you.

Playing co-operatively (which, mind you, is the way the game seems to want you to play) is a different story. The difficulty feels like it's ramped up to a disproportionate degree. If you play with just two or three players, the game will add additional AI-controlled characters so that you will always have a total of four. Except that in co-op, your AI-controlled buddies don't spawn infinitely to help you out. Once they're dead, they dead for the entire mission. So that leaves you trying to complete a mission that was meant for four people with only three or even worse, just two players. The difficulty is compounded with the frustratingly small number of continues you get... which are shared between all of your co-op friends. So if you end up playing with someone who likes to die a lot, plan on playing the same missions over and over again.

Another annoyance is the save mechanism. The game is broken up into episodes, which are broken up into missions, which are broken up into sections. Each section takes anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to complete. Complete missions can be done anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. I'm not sure who's idea it was to design the save points only inbetween missions, but getting through 90 percent of the sections only to use up all your continues at the very end and have to start the mission all over again (which took you 30 minutes to an hour to try to finish) because you can't save is annoyingly unnecessary.

But when the game works, it works. There was one particular level that centered around a giant cannon mounted on a moving train (with four distinct stations needed to fire it) that, had I been playing with three other people, would have been immensely of fun. You also get to pilot Lost Planet's version of armored mechs, called Vital Suits or VSs. They range from your average bipedal walking armored suit, to helicopters and something that I can only describe as a hovering Segway. And if some of the larger VSs break down, you can always rip the guns off of it and use it as a makeshift weapon.

Lost Planet 2 reminds me a lot of another one of Capcom's franchises, Monster Hunter. In Monster Hunter, you pretty much have to play co-op to complete most of the missions. Lost Planet 2 is better designed in that regard because you can complete it alone. But being constantly haunted by those three empty slots, you'll probably want to bring a friend.

Rating

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