Lost Planet: Xbox360 Rating: 8

Overall the game was pretty sweet but some of it was a bit of a let down. I expected a real impressive game from the commercials - its no gears of war.

I liked the thermal energy angle where you have to keep your t-energy loaded. A lot of the weapons were cool. This is a definite rental one-time game. The instructions for the controllers were not that easy to remember, it would have been better if it had training missions to learnt he controls for new VRs (fighting machines you climb in and control) - instead they show a controller diagram 1 time then you cant go back to it. It would have been nice if you could go into your PDA screen and review the controls, but it doesnt pause and your tenergy runs out when changing options (seems like a bug to me).

Also the game speed on foot was really slow - it felt like i was running through molasses, but that might just be because im used to faster FPS games like quake? There were some irritating things like, when you jump you are forced to pause when you land for about a 1/2 second which can cause some major problems, same thing when you use your grapple. Always managed to get hit when I was stuck landing.

And another thing:

Some of the bosses like green-eye where really really really hard, you have to find the weak spots and go through these series of attacks to kill the bosses, but then like the 7th boss - some guy in a VS with some goofy pony tails in his face, was incredibly easy - I beat him on the first try - other bossses like the first and second took hours of retrys.

Graphics: 9 - great next-gen graphics, cool monsters, a little sluggish occassionally when the action got real heavy.
Gameplay: 7 - intuitive controls and no major issues.
StoryLine: 3 I know its translated from Japanese but the story felt pretty tedious and didnt add much too the game IMO
Difficulty: 10 - Some of the bosses werre next to impossible! I spent 2-3 hours retrying most of them.
Length: 7 - 10 unique missions and the final boss battle - was good for probably 50+ hours of game play on average hardness (one above easy)

Overall 8

Anyway I beat it last night, was a worthwhile rent even with the annoying things in it. I got Dead Rising so I will play that after I watch 12 Monkeys in HD - thats a great movie.

Game on.



Spoiler Alert Final Boss:
One major thing that bugged me, the final boss - you get a brand new VS machine and all the weapons you have used the entire game are gone - now you get these giant knife laser beam blades that you have never used and have had no proactice with - so plan on spending a LOT of time on the final boss. After 2 hours or so I googled a walkthrough and finally got the hint I needed to beat him, which is: hold the l and r triggers down and then let go when you have the boss in firing range. Otherwise there is a 1/2 - 1 full second delay for the laser knife to fire - irritating.