A planet ravaged by snowstorms, home to a load of angry reptilian aliens, with human colonies surviving on a mix of giant "mech" walking vehicles and hoarding thermal energy – Lost Planet's setting has always been fairly interesting. It's a shame then that this prequel so badly bodges everything.
Told in a series of flashbacks, your gee-shucks, country-loving, everyman contractor is just there, initially, to kill the alien creatures, repair equipment and trudge around in a walking forklift. But soon you uncover a conspiracy among the companies running the colony and it all kicks off.
Or rather, it doesn't all kick – instead it feebly flaps into an over-the-shoulder action-adventure holding pattern littered with "fetch" quests (go find this part your mech needs, go kill that creature that's been bothering us) that feature utterly generic and predictable on-foot shooting and slightly more interesting hand-to-hand mech battles interspersed with long sections of you wandering around doing, well, not much.
It's not just the dull combat and acres of white snowy space to trudge through, it's also the hackneyed dialogue, the annoying controls and the numerous glitches and animation failures that mark this game for the bargain bucket. It looks like something from five or 10 years ago. Frankly, the enemy intelligence could have been programmed in the Space Invader era.
Sadly, too many console games feel like this currently. Considering a huge number of people are now choosing to play games on tablets or phones rather than consoles; considering the budget required to gamble on making any console game has spiralled so dramatically you either need to make a hit or risk going bust; and considering Capcom, Lost Planet's creators and a company once renowned for the cream of the Japanese crop, has polished turd after turd like this recently, this game should only have been made if it was going to be a cracker. It's a stinker.
The next console generation will fail dramatically if it can't come up with new visions for games – visions that need more power than phones or tablets can supply. On this showing, the old guard of games companies seem unlikely to be able to deliver such visions.
- Lost Planet 3 is out now. Developed by Spark Unlimited and published by Capcom. Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
- Read other gaming reviews on theartsdesk
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