So here we are again, in the distant future. Humans, the cockroaches of space, have once again colonized a new world in their never ending, ravenous hunt for real estate and natural resources. This time, they’ve set their sites on a frozen rock full of insect-like aliens known as Akrid. If the Akrid hadn’t been there, the humans would probably have passed on this particular planet – go figure. It is so cold that they must wear special “vital suits” which store thermal energy (apparently though, female vital suits don’t need to cover their cleavage – must be plenty warm there already). Unfortunately, these vital suits aren’t terribly efficient, so they must constantly be refilled or you will certainly freeze to death, leaving behind a well preserved, albeit horribly stiff corpse for future generations to dig up and stick in a museum. Enter the protagonist, your avatar in the game, Wayne. Wayne is a twenty-something military type, who must fight Akrids and “snow pirates” (their term, not mine) tooth and nail to gain every inch of ground and somehow manage not to turn into a human popsicle along the way.

To be brutally honest right up front, if you don’t like simple run and gun games, you probably won’t be much into Lost Planet, which is a third person shooter. But if you love games like Quake, Unreal, Halo, etc. you’ll probably enjoy Lost Planet. Me? I’m more of a tactical shooter fan, where you have to be more careful about what you do, and tactics come into play. So I didn’t enjoy Lost Planet all that much. That being said, I can’t give it a negative review simply on my personal preferences. The gameplay is good for a shooter. The graphics are stunning, and the tech is solid.

Let’s address graphics for a moment. My wife watched me play the game for a few minutes, and the first thing out of her mouth was “Wow.” She was amazed at how realistic it looked. Lost Planet is no Gears of War, graphically, but it comes fairly close. The snowy environment is portrayed well – snow piles up against the sides of ruined colonist structures, seeming to fill every nook and cranny. Chunks of the powdery stuff fly up behind your feet as you run through knee deep snow banks. This game has some of the best looking explosions I have ever seen - major props to the effects artists on the project. The level of detail is certainly up there with similar next-gen titles - lots of eye candy in Lost Planet. That is, until you go inside an Akrid cave, where it tends to be kind of dull and uninspiring. The character models are highly detailed and animation is good.

The basic objective of the game is to survive. Surviving involves killing everything else – typical of a shooter. The tools you must use to do so include machine guns, rocket launchers, energy weapons, shot guns, sniper rifles, grenades, and the occasional powered armor vital suit. There’s not much to say about the combat that hasn’t already been done in a hundred other shooters. You run, you gun - fire as many bullets as you can into everything that moves. However, the aforementioned powered armor vital suits add a cool new twist to vehicular combat. There are several varieties of these suits throughout the game, including a transforming one which can change between a slow walking robot and a fast moving ski mobile. Essentially large armored exoskeletons with massive guns, and jump jets – these vital suits will allow you to mow down the minor enemies with ease, and give you a fighting chance against the bosses and sub-bosses. Most of the suits allow you to equip weapons on both arms, at which time you can use both controller’s shoulder triggers to fire simultaneously. You can also exit the suit, take one of the massive weapons off and carry it around like Sergeant Slaughter’s mini-gun from Predator. The jump jets were a little hard to control thanks to some poor button choices, and I found that I hardly used them as a result, unless the level design required me to. They don’t last but a few seconds anyway – so you can’t fly around or hover for long.

The entire time you’re on your winter killing spree, you’ll need to collect glowing orange balls of thermal energy from the corpses of your victims before they evaporate into the ether of space and time. These balls of energy keep you alive in the frozen wastes, not to mention giving you something else to do besides shooting. Your survival suit is constantly bleeding energy, even when you’re just standing there, so don’t stay in one spot for too long twiddling your thumbs or you’ll freeze. You can also destroy some world props such as fuel storage tanks and old cars for energy (someone please explain how or why there are so many old 20th century style vehicle shells lying around this frozen planet). Most of the Akrid come out of nests, which must be destroyed to stem the flow of new bodies to shoot at. Along the way to the end game, you’ll also encounter snow pirates – not sure why they aren’t called energy pirates though, and giant Akrid bosses of varying degrees of difficulty.

The game doesn’t do a very good job of explaining things to you when it starts out. Some halfway descent tutorial messages would have been nice, but it doesn’t take too long to figure out what all your buttons do. If you can’t figure out what does what, just take a moment and go into the menu to look at the controller setup. Lost Planet is also terribly short – only 11 missions, each of which will take you anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to complete, but there are multiplayer modes and multiple difficulty settings which extend the life of the game considerably. If you’re an achievement hunter, the most difficult ones to get include beating the game on the hardest difficulty, killing a giant ‘un-killable’ Akrid worm, and finding dozens of coins hidden throughout the levels.

Lost Planet is fun, no doubt. It hit a million units sold a few weeks prior to the writing of this review, and thus the people have spoken. It isn’t my favorite type of game genre, but I can see why so many like it. Certainly, if you like shooters, it deserves your attention.