Reviews

While most of the UK pray every year for a bit of snow to make the day more exciting, it only takes one hour of slushing around and snowball fights before the snow becomes a pain - The car's stuck in the drive, you can't keep your feet on the ground, it's cold and there's still a job to get to. Much like Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for example. Ploughing through the frosty locations shooting giant bugs was great fun for the first hour or two, but then the repetition settled and the hard battles crept up from beneath the ice to test your patience. Credit to anyone who actually saw the game through to the closing credits.

Unless you've been following the pre-release material for Lost Planet 2 with a keen eye, you may be a little peeved to find the opening of the game is once again back in the land of snow. Thankfully after the brief scenario you're whisked off to the dense jungles of EDN III to take on the Akrids and such within the trees. When you're put in a jungle setting and given a Gatling gun, you can imagine there's immense fun to be had, reminiscing the classic Arnie film Predator, which is naturally a good thing.

Not all of the action takes place in the jungle though, this time Capcom has spoiled us with several different locations, including a shanty town, swamps and the desert, amongst other surprises. Each comes with their own challenge and set of foes to go with. Fighting along the shack rooftops or along a speeding train creates a different challenge, especially when a wrong step is as deadly as a giant monster or a powerful weapon being fired in your general direction. Needless to say it's not fun when a persistent rocket launcher locks onto you and takes pleasure in blasting you off a train time and time again.

Ultimately though, the objective remains the same, which is to equip heavy weaponry and kick ass, while activating data posts. These posts not only bring up vital enemy locations to your radar hud, but they also act as respawn points if a bug or two teaches you what for, which will happen on many occasions. This time you don't need to rely on thermal energy to keep your body warm in freezing temperatures. The thermal energy is still there to be collected in huge quantities, but it merely acts as health replenishment. Thankfully you can carry around more health than you need at times, which can be replenished by holding the Start button every time the gauge is in the red.

Along with the health bar comes the Battle Gauge, which is where the real worries are. Once you die you'll lose 500 points from the blue Battle Gauge. After several deaths the gauge will be empty and when this happens you've lost your chance to respawn and it's back to the very beginning of the chapter. This then means battling through several missions again just to get back to where you were. On one hand Capcom are giving you plenty of chances to get through the mission, if you don't take the chance then it becomes painful and repetitive. On the other hand, why couldn't they put checkpoints (or save points) between every mission, rather than every chapter? If there's one thing most gamers hate, it's having to do a huge chunk of the game again and again. This aspect may be the game's downfall in many people's eyes. Of course, many others will thrive on the challenge, the same people who completed Extreme Condition for instance.