The Frusteratingly Lost Planet

I picked up Lost Planet earlier this year. I had been excited about the title since the launch of the 360. I've always been a big supporter of Capcom and a big fan of Mega Man Creator Keiji Inafune. While Brad never understood my appeal behind the game, I was extremely excited. I finally got around to playing the copy I picked up and I'm beginning to see why it got the scores it did. First off, I love the look and presentation. The size and scale and the look to the worlds is gorgeous. I don't believe that to make a game look more beautiful is to make it more shiny. Lost Planet does a fantastic job of creating a stunning look of a snow covered environment and some of the bosses are stunning to look at. On top of that, the explosions and smoke effects are the best I've ever seen. The game play is fun and fast paced although at times repetitive. The story so far is more disjointed that I would have liked. I expected to see an epic Sci-fi story film that I'd be completely drawn into, but it seems more of hacked up bits and pieces of a incoherent plot. Even with all that, the game is great. Until you start noticing the little things. I always have said little things will make or break a game, and it seems to be the case here.

The boss battle for the third mission was just horrendous. You start off as one little guy against a full sized mech which proceeds to bombard you with rockets, machine gun fire, and laser beams. Thats all fine and dandy if you had the ability to move and dodge the attacks. Your character doesn't move in a way that you can effectively dodge those attacks. To further complicate things the mech has wickedly fast movement and has very little wait time in which to fire off it's rockets. You literally cannot move between when it fires rockets. If you get hit with one, by the time the animation gets you standing again, you have another rocket on top of you again. This is a huge developer error that I feel must not be simply overlooked. The developers were nice enough to place two mechs for you to use in the battle against the mission three boss, but by the time you enter the machine, it starts up, and is ready to fire, you've already lost half of its energy from the bosses attacks. But before that comes a frustrating option. You have the option to remove weapons off of mechs to use while standing, a neat little feature that's made complicated by the fact that the button to remove the weapon is the same as the button to enter it. So before you enter the vehicle you have to make sure you're standing at a point where it doesn't read your button press as trying to remove the weapon.

So here's my detailed description of my encounter with the boss. I'm running for my life to enter this mech for some sort of cover. I reach there by the skin of my teeth and I'm in a rush so I jam on the B button for dear life. And instead of getting inside, my character proceeds to remove the gatling gun off of the mech. When I try to replace the large firearm, I am hit with a rocket in which I lose a almost half of my life. My life slowly recharges as I impatiently wait for the "stand up" animation. When I am finally ready to move again, I am hit by another rocket which sends me back to the ground. Again, I wait for the "stand up" animation, but luckily this time the boss misses me with the rocket attack. I use this opportunity to run to the mech and hop in effectively. I take heavy damage as my mech initializes, all while the boss wails on me with machine gun fire and repeated laser beam attacks. Finally I'm ready to go only to find that my mech is now weapon-less because I removed the gatling gun by accident when I was trying to enter the first time. I take some more damage and then exit the vehicle as it is now about to explode and am now on the run again trying to find cover. Wash, Rinse, and Repeat, that's basically what happened to me for the first three times I fought the Boss on Mission Three. Each time I died a painfully slow and frustrating death. When I did manage to deal damage to the enemy, I would get caught in its rocket combo or be dealt a tremendous amount of damage where my thermal energy could not replenish fast enough. Any fun or satisfaction from the game was completely erased from these frustrating repeated battles. The experience was just so burned into my memory that when I venture out into the Snowy Planet tomorrow, I will be completely focused on the fear of what kind of horror awaits me.