Story
Set 10 years after the events of the first game, E.D.N. III has undergone some changes. It's no longer a huge frozen planet. Sections of the planet have become lush jungles and huge deserts. One thing that remains constant though is the need for T-ENG, the substance that powers practically everything and helps keep players alive. Also some of the akrid have grown substantially larger. The planet is undergoing a civil war of sorts as different factions vie for control. As you play through the main campain you will switch between characters in these factions.
You start off as a member of the Snow Pirates invading a Jungle Pirates mining base. You'll also play as members of NEVEC, Waysiders, Vagabundo, and some ex-NEVEC commandos. The overall story is told through their eyes which makes the story a bit disjointed and hard to follow. At points you wonder what the heck is going on? Towards the end it finally comes together in a we-have-to-tie-it-all-together kind of way, but by then you've just given up on the story and are along for the ride, and what a ride. You'll battle other factions and akrid, some of which are so huge you have to be swallowed by it to defeat it from the inside by shooting up it's internal organs.
Controls
While not bad they weren't great. Some buttons had multiple uses which made a little confusion at times. The B button (Circle for PS3 owners) became sort of a catch-all button with running, melee, and data point/vital suit activation all being mapped to it. Overall the control was fine, it just took some getting used to it.
Gameplay
The gameplay is your basic third person shooter, shoot everything that moves. Lost Planet 2 though really weighs heavily towards 4 player co-op. So much so that by default if you want to play the campaign it will try to drop you into an game online, if you are not connected online it will try system link. If you want to play by yourself you have to go into the settings and set it to offline. Even then you still get 3 AI players that follow you around. They're not exactly the brightest AI, but they aren't the worst. They do sometimes fight smart enough not to get killed. You do have the option to play with a friend split screen also.
One problem with the co-op, no jump-in. If you have a friend that wants to join you they have to wait for you to finish your mission (missions are several chapters long). Also your friend has to have played as far into the game as you have, no joining missions they haven't played through yet.
Even so if you have 3 friends that have the game also, the co-op campaign is solid and works best when all slots are filled with humans.
The one thing this game did pretty well is the online multiplayer. Capcom took the civil war from the storyline and applied it to this. Each faction is battling for control of the planet. When you jump into the multiplayer you can choose which faction you are fighting for. As the factions win battles stats are kept to show who's the winning-est faction.
Graphics and Sound
The graphics are really beautiful. In some cases if enemies weren't trying to kill you or akrid trying to bite your head off you might even enjoy the view. The art style for the various factions really reminded me of the the artwork of Moebius, because while their outfits didn't look functional, the did look cool. The soundtrack was very good and so was the voice acting.
Overall
While my basic rule of "did I have fun" applies here, the game did have it's annoyances. The biggest is the game leaning hard on the co-op play. The game does not scale to whether you are playing by yourself or not. I have nothing against playing co-op, but it would be nice if the game scaled itself to the number of players. There was a boss battle I played by myself that I would get killed over and over. I finally got some serious luck to get past, but damn it was hard.
Borderlands and Crackdown are both game I feel show how a game can scale well. Replacing human players with AI does not cut it. I have yet to play a game where they do. Yet neither of those game try to fill out a party with useless AI players and they play and scale well, whatever the party size. I have to give a big thanks and shout to BBboy20, Da Slayer45, lazyboy71, wanderingsolder, and RaspyClock for helping me play though the campaign.
One other problem, and this might be more to other people than me is a possibly offensive ethnic stereotype. Remember the old western movies that had the Mexican bandits that were not quite the brightest, half-drunk on tequila and where played for comedic relief? Well they are the Vagabundo faction here. In fact you play a whole mission as them. Now I did enjoy the comedy this brought to the story, but I know someone somewhere is going to get a politically correct and seriously offended. I say this because it wasn't just a couple of them that were stereotypical, the whole group was. To the point of at one point I wondered how they all survived long enough to get this far.
I did though overall have fun. I mean really, how many games do you get to play where you have to be swallowed by a giant monster to defeat it? Lost Planet 2 gets a 4 out of 5.
Lost Planet 2 is rated T for Teen for Animated Blood, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
Also they have some really cool unlockable skins.
No comments:
Post a Comment