It isn’t the games that you love or hate right out of the box that give you hardest time, it is the ones that leave you unsure that make the act of coming up with 1500 words worth of gibberish and then slowly trying to craft them into some kind of line of reason on why I should hand out some kind of grade to a game mildly difficult. Let my take you on this journey with me, because God knows if you are here, you have enough pity to read the review.

The hype for Lost Planet seemed to have died somewhere around December, which is depressing because the game came out just over two weeks ago (January). I don’t know if this is a conscience push being done by manufactures to have games come out during the entire year and not just one month before Christmas (because they got my letters, written in nothing but hate, about have I normally have to take out a loan every year) or if it is the odd game that gets left to come to a boil and is just forgotten about. I am hoping that it is the former because of all of the restraining orders that I have been getting recently. Hopefully this new addictive to the cake that is gaming will allow me to savor the flavor all year long, and not forget about the rare delights that are mixed to heavily with all the other treats.

Lost Planet looks like a next generation game, it plays like a next gen game, and it sounds like one, it even has next generation bugs running at you all the time, too bad it has the plot of a first generation game. There are two things that are lacking from everything that the game throws at you for the story, facts and logic. “This machine has the power to prolong your life” how? “Only the pirates are truly the ones who are right in this world” are you sure about that? Simple things like that keep you guessing until the end when nothing you really wanted to know is resolved.

The level design is beautiful, but flawed. You won’t notice that you can’t explore half the area because everything comes down to sprinting across the map to a set point where you are taken to the next map where you sprint to a set point where the boss comes out and you fight him. The levels are all diverse and different (with one exception of half a level that gets recycled for some reason) but they all follow the same formula: A to B, load up on ammo, fight boss. Rinse, repeat. You can go through the entire game without ever killing any enemy besides the ten bosses.

The best thing about Lost Planet is that this is a game not accustomed to coming out on an X-Box platform. Games that normally come out for the X-Box are Halo or DoA Extreme Beach Volley Ball, the kind of games that you expect to walk into any of your unemployed friends house’s and see them playing with a giant bong in front of him. Lost Planet is the game that you would normally see the PlayStation. A system that regardless of the quality of the game you could be sure that they were going to sell several hundred thousand of them by finding some kind of niche in a hundred million people market(I am looking at you Ribbit King). This isn’t the kind of game that people make for a Microsoft platform.

Multiplayer has one of the greatest game mechanics in recent memory, walking over your friends with a giant mech. I really don’t know if enough can be said about the satisfaction that can be received from walking up to a friend who is about to land a headshot on some player and just crushing their skull with a giant armored suit of death. You might say parenting, but I really want you to know that is just going to get a bunch of people around you to look at you and know that you are just dead inside.

Multiplayer is fun, but only because no one who owns the game really seems to understand how to play it. Simple rule for anyone who has any intention of playing any game online against anyone: Beat the single player portion of the game. What to have a greater understanding of how to kill a mech with just a handgun? Play the single player game. Need some practice getting in some headshot? Guess where you can play against some of the world’s worst A.I.? Well, if you need me to go on this train of thought you probably aren’t going to pick up the single player game, you are probably going to complain about how you really don’t understand how people are blowing the hell out of you while you are halfway across the map in a mech.

Definitely a reason that I could never give this game a perfect score is based entirely on the fact that the option to “voice mask” is placed directly on the multiplayer option screen. Not hidden, not tucked away, not even able to disable the damn thing in hosted matches. If you want to sound like the biggest moron in the room you just need to push down twice before you start looking for a match. Why this hasn’t been removed from X-Box live proper is a mystery to everyone, but rest assured the only people who use it are 12 year olds who want you to think that they are really their father. Pro Tip: If you want to throw them off when they are trying to act all cool about “drinking a brew” ask them who they voted for in the 1992 elections. After they answer quickly tell them they weren’t old enough to vote and ban them from ever joining another match with you ever again.

This game was pretty much summed up several paragraphs ago, niche. If you enjoyed the majority of arcade shoots that you have played, and you are looking for something that has a really odd ranking system that seems to persist over time, pick it up. If you don’t want to crush bugs skulls with your giant mech foot, you might want to hold off until next month when the multiplayer beta of Halo comes out.

Score 8/10