Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (Xbox 360) Review

The grappling hook adds a lot more vertical freedom than we've come to expect from third person shooters. You can climb tall buildings with a couple of grapples, and even grapple onto the top of enemy Vital Suits. The only downside here is that it can be hard to determine which surfaces will allow your grappling hook to attach, which often gives the enemy enough time to blast you.

On the linear path through the game, you'll find six weapons, five types of grenades, and seven VS weapons that can easily be pulled from a VS and wielded by your super human character.

The Vital Suits are great, offering lots of variety to the action. You'll encounter several different models throughout the game, offering abilities like transforming from a snowmobile to a robot, and hover jumps. Jump in to an unfamiliar VS and you'll get a quick rundown on it's abilities, which is great apart from the fact you're expected to identify the specific VS and remember its intricacies by sight alone from that point forward.

Saving of your progress is done with an automatic checkpoint system, which worked fantastically in Gears of War, however leaves a little to be desired here. For one, they aren't that often which is a let down, especially earlier in the game when you are still fighting the learning curve, and have to hike 5 minutes or more through terrain you've already seen and battles you've already won to get back to wherever you died. This is compounded by the fact you get no indication you've actually reached a checkpoint - so at no stage can you really relax and soak in the game as much as you could.

Single Player

There's 11 missions in the single player campaign, which the average gamer will breeze through in under ten hours. Only pedantic or hardcore gamers will find much replay value after they've beaten the game - playing the game again on Hard, or the newly unlocked Extreme difficulty setting, or finding the "Target Marks" hidden throughout the levels.

It's the epic boss fights that really make the single player campaign worthwhile. The magnitude of some of the bugs you go up against has to be seen to be believed, very much of the David and Goliath vein, and consistently provide the most frantic experiences in the game.

With Gears of War offering co-operative play both split-screen and over Xbox Live, the lack of any such equivalent in Lost Planet seems like a glaring oversight. Having a buddy help you out with some of the more intense battles would've been incredibly useful, and of course more fun.

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