It’s time for the second Lost Planet title! I played the first one very recently so it’s definitely still top of mind. This one doesn’t quite match up to the first one though either in story or gameplay. Part of what makes this one unique is that the whole game is balanced around the multiplayer aspect. So playing on your own actually puts you at a rather heavy disadvantage. I do think this game would get massively boosted if you had other people to play with but as a solo game it is still good.

The game’s story is anthology style as you play as different factions in each episode. Then by the end you finally get to play as all of them. The context here is that the planet is finally vibrant after the events of the first game so now everyone is fighting for their own interests. Some want money, some want honor, etc. The alien creatures are still around but they’re more of an afterthought at this point. If you see one then you blow it up but otherwise they aren’t exactly a big threat at this stage. Just take them out and keep moving but is it possible that the aliens are planning something big?

The campaign is reasonably long. There are 6 episodes, each episode has around 4 chapters and each chapter has 2-6 missions. The missions themselves can really range in length from some being around 10 minutes to others being over 30. So you never quite know what you’re about to get yourself into so always stay prepared. The objective is usually to get to the end of an area but other times you have to protect some devices, activate towers, or beat all enemies in an area. There is quite a lot of variety here.

The gameplay is that of a 3D shooter so you run around and blast away at everyone. There are a lot of weapons so you will want to see which is your favorite. Personally I feel like the shotgun is easily the best one. It hits almost as hard as the rockets but also fires off rounds much quicker. What this means is you can comfortably beat almost any minion in one hit with it and you also deal powerful damage against the boss. It has more ammo than the rockets as well so it really does feel like the most overpowered weapon in the game. To make up for this, the spawn rate isn’t great. You will go many missions where you don’t even see it.

One thing to remember is that weapons carry over when you beat a mission so just make sure you hang onto it. You can also find mechs to ride. When you jump into a mech you get weapons that are much stronger than normal. Most of them can also hover or fly for a while which is great and the armor is more advanced. They are really necessary for when the enemies bring out their own mechs. If you try to beat one while you are on foot then I guarantee that it is not going to go well. You are going to get absolutely demolished no matter how you look at it. Even run and gun tactics are often not effective because they can move faster than you can. So once you get into range to land a blow it is already too late.

As far as the graphics go, I would say the game ages pretty well. The environments look pretty good and I like the designs of the mech suits. There isn’t a lot of opportunity for the game to really show off in terms of colors since this isn’t a very colorful game but it works well enough. As for the soundtrack, that is a bit more forgettable. I can’t really recall any iconic tunes off the top of my head at least but it does the job well enough.

The A.I. is definitely terrible though. It goes back to the difficulty scale not being meant for single player. There are missions where each player has a task like in the big boss fight where you have to use a ship against it. You need one guy cooling down the ship in the engine room, one using the cannon, and 2 to load the cannon with ammo. The only thing that the computers knew how to do was load the cannon. They couldn’t fire it or cool the ship down so I had to do everything on my own. In normal mode this was effectively impossible as a result so at that point in the game I had to lower the difficulty.

As you can probably expect, this is an issue to an extent in every level though. The allies don’t really do their part in supporting you so you really have be a one man army and that’s not easy. You start to run out of ammo quickly this way as well as energy. The game has an interesting mechanic where you can always regenerate your energy as long as you have some stockpiled but otherwise when you lose health it is just gone. Also, you can be defeated while you are regenerating and you will end up being surrounded by enemies before long. Outside of missions that have a time limit, it can be a fun way to test your skills though. Can you effectively defeat all of the enemies on your own? Due to the energy system you can also die a few times before it runs out so that’s another thing to keep in mind. You don’t have to literally be perfect or anything like that.

One thing I noticed is whenever I would leave the game during a mission, the game data would corrupt. That could just be my copy but keep that in mind. Try to beat as many levels as possible because otherwise it takes a while to rebuild the game each time. I am glad to know about this for the future for other PS3 games though. If you delete the game data without deleting the save data then you can actually continue from where you left off after reinstalling the title. It’s a pretty good trick although hopefully I won’t actually need it later on.

Overall, I had a good time with the game. It definitely had some issues like the A.I. not being very good and the difficulty balancing in general though. They should have worked on the single player experience more even if that wasn’t the focus. The data corruption was rough but that might have been more of a disc thing than the game itself. So I would say to check this game out but maybe start it on easy mode from the jump. You will need to change later on anyway so you might as well enter it this way. At some point I’ll definitely need to check out the third game even if it does seem rather infamous.

Overall 7/10