Guardian GamesBlog On "Lost Planet"

Lost Planet is a 360 title which got some pretty good E3 press:

Okay, the visuals are astonishing in places. The way your character's feet sink into the snow as blizzards blow flakes around you. The astonishingly realistic explosions. The intricately detailed glacial majesty of the environments. All as you would expect from a next-gen machine.

But the gameplay is pure this-gen. Actually, it's more-or-less previous-gen. Pick up (extremely familiar) weapons, blast aliens, encounter bosses sporting clear weak spots, activate computer terminals, pick up bigger weapons, sneak about a bit, shoot a bit more.

There were a couple of nice touches - the way you could either clamber into huge mech walkers, or take off their enormous machine guns and use them as your primary weapons. The way your energy bar is always going down and must continually be topped up (but guess what? energy orbs come from... yes... dead enemies). I also liked the flying aliens that swoop at you in formation - not because it was an interesting idea, but because it looked cool.

-- Lost Planet. Lost interest?

Honestly, though, is this any different from early titles in any generation's library? At first, the eye candy will be in the forefront because nobody's played anything with those visuals on their television before. Then, before people start figuring out their compression and data schemes to improve those visuals significantly ... you'll get better gameplay.




tagged: game, gaming