Lost Planet 3 review: snow day

While the original Lost Planet marked Capcom’s entrance into "next-gen" when it came out six years ago, 2010’s follow up failed to keep up the series’ momentum. With that, Capcom handed the keys to the snow-bound kingdom to California-based developer Spark Unlimited.

Spark Unlimited’s solution to Lost Planet’s sophomore slump: to take the series back before the original, and to completely rebuild the game’s basic structure from linear third-person shooting to something more open. In that regard, Spark Unlimited has made something more interesting than the glut of competent shooters out there. But Lost Planet 3 has trouble finding the gameplay competency of those games in some very basic ways.

Set decades before the events of either of its predecessors, Lost Planet 3 follows the exploits of "independent contractor" Jim Peyton as he lands on the icy, alien world EDN III. Peyton has been hired-on to perform various contracts for a scientific expedition seeking to investigate the potential super-energy source known as T-eng, which could be the answer to the Earth’s energy crisis.

Throughout Lost Planet 3, there are a number of pretty on-the-nose corollaries drawn between current fears of global warming and fossil fuel consumption and the game’s background story of the Earth’s slowly collapsing civilization. But this works to establish a sense of purpose and gravitas running beneath the different characters’ interactions with one another, and exactly what’s at stake as the story progresses.

Thankfully I was never waiting that long. The nimble robotic Vital Suits of previous Lost Planet games are absent from Lost Planet 3, but they've been replaced by more primitive bipedal construction vehicles known as Rigs. Peyton spends much of his time exploring EDN III and doing jobs in his rig, and in many ways, "Gertie" is as much a character as anyone else — Peyton’s working class attachment to the tool his life and livelihood depends on is contagious, particularly as you build her up via modifications and upgrades.

As you perform contracts and kill akrid, you collect T-eng and specialized components to upgrade Gertie as well as Peyton’s gear, which ties into Lost Planet 3’s overall story progression. Lost Planet 3 is built around a sort of interconnected series of environments with what eventually becomes a couple of primary hubs — there’s even a fast-travel system available a few hours in. This introduces the opportunity for side missions and secrets to find that can yield tangible rewards and develop the game’s world and fiction.

That world and the way Payton navigates it are the best thing Lost Planet 3’s has going for it. It’s fun to sit in the rig and repair industrial equipment with a giant claw and drill, and it’s fun to wrestle giant akrid to the ground after fighting them on foot, dwarfed by their stature. And Lost Planet 3 works best when it keeps moving, when it lets the player keep moving. For much of the game, you’re doing fundamentally different things every five to ten minutes.

Here, the framerate combined with the stiff controls and sometimes excessively punishing combat design make for something I found impossible to enjoy. At other times, Lost Planet 3 will impart a one-off mechanical quirk early in the game, only to leave it abandoned until, say, the middle of a boss fight later on. I hope you remember that you can use the left stick while grappling an enemy with your rig’s claw to manipulate them later on. If not, you’re likely to die and reload over and over the way I did near the end of the game.

But it’s the lackluster shooting experience that keeps Lost Planet 3 from being the great, unexpected departure it might otherwise be for the Lost Planet series. Too often, I had to trek back through previously seen areas and fight previously conquered hordes of akrid, and as the game wound toward the end, my interest in how the story would involve was shaken by more and more firefights.