Review on Lost Planet 2

Don't Hold Your Breath
I never cared much for the original game story, so I had high hopes for the sequel to the Lost Planet series. I am sad to say that I think it failed once again. While the main character was not a Japanese wimpy boy, it didn't follow a solid storyline, but instead 6 different convoluted episodic story lines of various soldiers. It was hard to follow, but especially as a college student that plays this within their free time and gets it in bits and pieces. I would have thought that would be nice for a person that kept jumping into the action, but it really just proved to be annoying and I wound up skipping the cinematic scenes all together.


Clunky
Aside from story is the game-play, I really felt that the game was kind of clunky and not well configured controller wise. Everything seemed to be tap B button, or press B button and I often found myself performing a command I did not want done. I also thought that the game seemed annoyingly redundant in that you storm a base or planet-side, find 4 various area markers, and then move on. The levels all seemed too short and dull. It was also annoying how you would have to play through them ALL just to get to a point where you could save your game and each episode was at least an hour of playtime. The game did have some merit though. The visuals were stunning and great and the music was spectacular. It really immersed the player in a sense of action. The enemy Akrid and overall gameplay kinda varied through fun and repetitiveness. Sometimes it wasn't fun because they simply made it too hard to evade enemy attacks and they would often kill you in one blow. It did not seem to have quite enough music for my liking and often just had quiet parts. I also wasn't all to impressed with the voice acting and how every character had some kind of face mask so they could avoid mouth movement animation. This is something someone that has taken a Machinima, and various animation classes such as myself would take a particular notice in. Overall the game didn't strike me as something 2010 would be boasting.

Online Play Confusing
I also thought that the developers were trying a bit too hard to comply with the co-op online crowd. Sure this targets the "team player" demographic of my millennial generation. However, it really just all and out was poorly executed and annoying. To jump in on a game, there was always a waiting room and never an available game to get in on right away. So, I would always have to create my own game and never expect anyone to jump in. It has an option to not put any AI players into the battlefront with you, but it didn't work. I wish it would have because I find the ally AI system on your team in the way and annoying. I was often shooting them or they weren't there when I needed them. A simple command control on the D-Pad like most games have was a necessity.

Need for Innovative Weaponry
The weapons and gundam suits in the game were cool, but I think that they could have been much, much cooler. The suits only flew for a little bit at a time and were really slow and awkward. I also thought that it was stupid how most weapons took forever to reload or seemed a bit primitive and uncreative. I thought for a sci-fi game, they could have had more awesome and innovate futuristic weapons. The gundam suits also never seemed to be able to carry more than one gun at a time. It was also kinda lame how nothing in the game had an upgrade, ever. Which would have been nice considering that the ammo capacity was so limited.  

Rating
On a scale of 1-10 I would give this...
Visuals: 7
Animations: 5
Story:  4.5
Game-play: 5
Overall Fun: 6
Pros: Pretty good visuals, fun to play in short doses, proved to be challenging, may it be frustrating, supplementing an addictive quality.
Cons: Clunky controls, failure to establish functional online co-op, AI and animation was off, no upgrades, lame story.