Remember when I reviewed the Turok games? I know it was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then. But in those games I admitted to never completing them without cheats or with the second one never truly beating it as I had gotten stuck on the Mantids level. Lost Planet is another game from my past I never finished. I got stuck on a boss, then moved onto another game and before I had a chance to go back and complete it, my 360 red ringed. Well I found it on Steam and decided over a decade later, it’s time to finish the fight.

Lost Planet Extreme Condition is Capcom’s big entry into the start of the Xbox 360 generation. A brand new IP from the long standing company. Set on E.D.N. III an ice planet in the future that man is working to colonize. Originally this was proving most difficult thanks to the native creatures of the world, the Akrid. But after Thermal energy was discovered within the Akrid man gained new vigour to fight back and make the world theirs, also thanks to the use of their piloted mechs called Vital Suits or VSs. You play as Wayne Holden where he and his father are attacked by a large Akrid called the Green Eye. This bit is essentially your training experience before the game starts fully, giving you a small experience of the on foot 3rd person action and a small bit of the Mech piloting experience.

After that you’re found by a small band of people Yuri, Luka and Rick, which is helpful as your memory is rather fragmented from essentially being frozen in your VS following the attack. So your first proper level has you move through the frozen landscape, gunning down Akrid to get to a hive and beat a boss. Your base weapon is a machine gun, and I often just used this against most enemies. There was plenty of ammo for it and unless it was fighting enemy VS or anything with big armour, that was all I needed. A mechanic to the game is that you need thermal energy to live. Doing actions though uses it up. You can refill from killing enemies, notably Akrid often dropping big pulls when downed. You can also find these by shooting, what looks like big barrel like water tower things, or getting a large influence when setting up beacons that also show you the direction you should be going in.

Fighting Akrid is also quite mechanically driven in this game as their biology will show areas with large stores of Thermal energy which are their weak points. These are often things like their tails so dodging and unloading your machine gun into it is the best way to fight them, especially the boss fights done in VSs.

Less mechanical sounds are when you’re fighting humans and their VSs. The machine gun is what I would still use most often to kill human targets, if I don’t have a rifle of some kind to try and snipe them. But against armour, it’s usually dodge and missile launcher them till they blow up in a few shots. Problems do tend to occur though when you fight multiple ones with explosives and you get juggled about unable to really start moving because you have been knocked down by an explosive and you then need to get back up again. Your stocks of thermal energy will heal you at the cost of using them up, but it gets so annoying.

Story wise I wasn’t happy at how in the first sections of the game the story felt rushed through, with developments that should have been slowly built up just happened without any real exploration of that for Wayne and his friends and then moving much slower in the second half as the full story of what’s going on happens. Just kind of hard to get the full looming sense of that approaching when it’s not really developing till that half way point in the story.

While I enjoyed the boss fights against the Akrid, dodging about to unload on their weak points, boss fights against VSs felt just a fair bit more bleh. You get the usual problem of AI having perfect aiming even while moving made worse that they will keep loading into you while you have to go through the slow process of getting into a new mech should the one you came into the fight in take too much damage. Not helped that the same button used for going into a mech, if standing in the wrong place could do something like taking off the weapon to use it as a human, Or when trying to get a new weapon or more ammo for one, you need to make sure you’re standing with your VS at the right side and close enough or an action you don’t want will happen, and in a boss fight that is kind of BS.

Still happy to say I did beat the game, all its clunklyness aside, there was a multiplayer… but not sure those servers still exist as the steam version didn’t even have achievements (as I found to my annoyance when I killed an optional boss). I probably won’t be returning to the game since this was more a case of finishing an old job. But it was still a unique IP to start a then new console generation. Had a lot of promise, sadly after the 3rd game that was it for the franchise and Capcom are considerably less likely to bring back old IPs.

Rating: 🎮🎮🎮