It’s difficult to release a game in January. Development teams push for months to ready a lineup of titles for the fourth quarter to capitalize on the holiday spending of consumers, leaving both developers and gamers’ budgets spent for the time immediately afterward. Capcom seems to really enjoy the fresh feeling of a new year, as they’ve released major titles such as Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry 2 during the month of January. Lost Planet is actually fairly suited for a January release because the snow filled game should heat up everyone’s living room.

Lost Planet’s single player campaign puts you in the shoes of Wayne, a solider who works with his father Gale in order to rid the world of the creatures known as the Akrid and harvest the natural energy source they possess. Wayne ends up being frozen inside his VS (Vital Suit) where three snow pirates find and rescue him. Wayne wakes up attached to a thermal energy machine, which is an important energy source for the people that live on E.D.N. III, and cannot remember anything before he was frozen. Throughout the game Wayne slowly recovers his memory and a revenge-based storyline is gradually fleshed out. Lost Planet’s timeline varies throughout each level, one second you’re going after snow pirates, the next mission its two years later and you’re staking out the NEVEC Corporation. At first the storyline looks to be promising but the game ends way too quickly and very awkwardly. It will take you anywhere between 6 to 10 hours to beat depending on your difficulty and if you just rush through it, and there isn’t much here to keep players interested in the characters or story events.

Thermal energy plays a major role in the pacing of the game and should always be observed. T-Energy supplies Wayne with a heat source that allows him to survive in cold terrain of E.D.N. III., and once he runs out of it, his body starts shutting down. The amount of T-Energy Wayne has is constantly running down, and does so with various speeds depending on the amount of energy that Wayne is exerting, be it from jumping around, to running and shooting, operating a mech, or simply standing still in the howling wind. There are a couple ways to refill the T-Energy gauge and keep Wayne alive, first and foremost of whichh is defeating enemies. Standard Akrid enemies and human snow pirates will spit out small amounts of T-ENG while bigger enemies such as Vital Suits or giant creatures called Chryatis will leave large pools of it. Another way to obtain your precious Thermal Energy is finding a Way Point and hacking into it by hammering the B button. It isn’t as easy as you may think since in many cases there will be scores of enemies around you and you can easily find yourself taking damage if you don’t time your actions right. Way points are posts that will do two subjects. When you finish hacking into them, they will shoot out a light arrow in order to guide you to your next location. This helps if you’re going through a large area and you get lost. Unfortunately there is only one mission that you most likely will need to find your way through. When the player’s thermal energy hits zero, their health starts dropping fast, and in most cases, unless they happen to be right beside a Way Point, they can consider themselves dead well before their frozen corpse hits the ground. On the flip side, when the player has plenty of Thermal Energy, they have fairly little to fear from losing health. Most enemy attacks won’t kill the player outright in a single hit, and the health meter recharges so fast that they’ll be back in business before they know it.



Another new feature that will please many people is the grappling hook. Here is an interesting tool that you will be using constantly. This is basically a hook Wayne can shoot out in order to grab onto something (within a set distance) and allow him to fly to locations you wouldn’t think one person could get to. Additionally, if Wayne runs off the edge of a structure, the grappling hook will automatically grab onto the ledge and allow the player to climb back up, or make a controlled descent to a lower area. Unfortunately most of the levels in the game are designed to be fairly linear, and so it was a bit of a disappointment that Capcom could have done a lot of interesting things with it such as unlockable areas or having more of a free roaming environment setting. Overall, the grappling hook does little other than provide shortcuts across vertical routes, as well as provide evasive techniques for multiplayer.