![]() ![]() The on-foot gameplay fares little better. Gertie feels about as responsive as an oil tanker, which leads to several discouraging moments when utilised in a fight you know precisely what to do, but actually performing the action is hit and miss due to the amount of time the rig takes to respond to your commands. Even worse, movement when in the rig is slow, clunky and downright frustrating. I want an awesome giant robot, not a glorified, if oversized, walking screwdriver. The problem though, is that tools are boring. Jim’s rig is, in essence, a tool – and the game nails this feeling superbly. It somehow manages to take the thrill of piloting a gigantic robot into battle against alien monster crabs the size of a house, and turns it into a continuous trudge never anything more than perfunctory. Mechs! How can a game with mechs in it be bad? Well, unfortunately, by simply being Lost Planet 3. Lost Planet 3 undeniably offers up a compelling premise, then: an alien environment, increasingly-huge Akrid enemies to fight, and mechs. These options, however, appear to have little or no noticeable impact on the game, and the collection of thermal energy ended up seeming merely incidental rather than the driving force that it deserves to be. It is also awarded to you when completing missions, and can be used to purchase new weapons and rig upgrades. When killing Akrid, this thermal energy can be collected, which is handy because, as well as driving the plot along, it is used as the currency in Coronis. It is found within the planet itself, and is also the blood of the Akrid that you constantly fight on excursions from the base. A naturally-occurring phenomenon, it is seen to be the answer to the burgeoning energy crisis on Earth. Thermal energy is the entire reason for NEVEC being on the planet in the first place. – whilst working towards your given objective, be it collecting the reservoir of thermal energy from a well, or repairing a satellite uplink. Once outside of the protective shell of Gertie, you’ll be running around the environment armed with a pistol and two main weapons, gunning down all kinds of Akrid – the aggressive indigenous life forms of E.D.N.III. When in the rig (sweetly named ‘Gertie’), you’ll alternate between walking around the planet, grabbing and drilling various contraptions, and fighting giant crab monsters – all in a day’s work for Nic Cage Jim. Fixit bipedal mech) and more traditional third-person segments. Typical early missions are split between first-person movement in Jim’s rig (think a utilitarian Mr. In reality, as is so often the case on far-flung icy planets, things quickly start spiralling out of control. In theory, this means roaming the area around NEVEC’s base on the planet, the Coronis, patching up pipes, extracting thermal energy from wells and other odd jobs proposed to you by the base commander. Jim has just arrived on E.D.N.III, an icy and hostile environment, to take on contract work for the Neo-Venus Construction Company (NEVEC for short) in order to provide a future for his wife and young son back on Earth. Try as it might, however, Lost Planet 3 is not the game my mis-spent youth desires.ĭeveloped by Spark Unlimited (most famous for the middling Call of Duty: Finest Hour way back in 2004), Lost Planet 3 drops you in to the boots of Jim Peyton, full-time rig driver and part-time Nicolas Cage tribute act, several years before the events of the first two games. I often long for a seemingly-bygone era, yearning for a game that thrills me with exciting and outlandish scenarios, such as pitting giant mechs against imaginatively-horrific alien creatures in a variety of locales. From endless military shooters to gritty reboots of once-famous videogame icons, it is increasingly becoming an art form that imitates life. Gaming of late has become bogged down with emulating the ‘real’. Windows PC, Xbox 360 (reviewed), PlayStation 3 ![]()
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