Lost Planet 3

[NARMAK]

Lost Planet 3's reveal presentation is one of the cleverest game unveils I've ever encountered. Showcasing tense, Dead Space-style exploration in an abandoned base alongside powerful mech combat and a a touch of tundra exploration, it leaves you feeling like Lost Planet 3 is taking the series in a new, more interesting direction, distancing itself from the previous two games in the series. It rekindled interest in Capcom's dormant series at the same time as pitching this entry as something new and better.

Everyone responded very positively. But at E3, for some reason, Capcom seemed to be keen to emphasise that Lost Planet 3 is all about the action, too, which leads us to believe that what we saw before E3 might not actually be representative.

The short gameplay demo on show put hero Jim in a very different scenario, down in an Akrid nest full of weak insectoids spawning from sphincters on the walls. Basically, this amounted to watching a man shoot a hunting rifle (one of Jim's family heirlooms, it seems) at exploding insects and clusters of eggs for ten minutes - we saw none of the more interesting combat or elements of exploration that caught our attention in the reveal. Unfortunately it really reminded me of some of the least inspiring moments in Lost Planet 2, whose repetitive shooting made some of the sections between big boss battles a chore.

"Our first demo is a more suspenseful kind of atmosphere, which is great, but we want to let people know that first and foremost Lost Planet 3 leans towards the action side of things," said producer Andrew Szymanski, asked about this additional demo's different tone. "We really just wanted to clarify that that’s not all you’re going to be doing. I’d say about 20% of the game consists of those suspenseful sequences as opposed to action-orientated sequences, and that’s what we wanted to show here."

I can't help but be a little disappointed at this revelation - not that shooting things is boring, but shooting at the same unchallenging enemies for most of the game doesn't sound like fun. The demo picked up a little towards the end, where an incoming storm sent the Akrid scuttling for cover as Jim held up his arm in front of his face to protect himself from the cold. The level of visual detail is still impressive - clearly, a lot of love has gone into making these weather effects and making planet E.D.N. III feel like the inhospitable, dangerous wasteland that it is.

We also got a little clarification on how thermal energy - those orange orbs collected from slain foes - is going to work in the game. It's fairly open-ended - if you choose to explore outside of the main missions, you'll find pockets of thermal energy where you can plant posts to harvest it. The longer you leave it, the more energy you'll get when you eventually venture back, but Akrid are also drawn to the heat, meaning that you might return to find it encrusted in eggs at the heart of a new hive. Thermal energy is the game's currency, and given that Jim took a job on E.D.N III to support his family back home, he needs as much of it as possible.

For anyone with reservations about Lost Planet, this isn't an encouraging showing - it left us actually feeling less excited about the game, where the reveal presentation built up a lot of buzz. We'll have to hope that the rest of the game's action is more exciting than this.

There may be an existing thread but with the loss and the search function not working, i'm not manually trawling through to find it, so i started a new thread.