The Battle Gauge is a shared collection of points which are diminished every time a character is killed and crucially, it isn't replenished after you've spend 15 minutes plugging away at an enormous Daddy Long Legs. Unfortunately, because the game is so clearly weighted towards co-op, Capcom has felt the need to balance the difficulty for larger teams. In one sequence, you're on a train speeding across a vast desert like on a Dune sandworm - there aren't many shooters that are this hat stand and if you can rope three mates in, you'll be thankful for the added firepower.

You also spend an awful lot of your time hammering a button to open up data posts which act as respawn points.Īt the very least Lost Planet 2 retains its ridiculous scale, you'll be battling enormous Akrid throughout the campaign, and it's difficult not to be impressed as you attempt to wrangle an insect that's four storeys high. The visuals are dense, but not particularly pretty, the characters are still disproportionately squat and the combat consists of unloading as much of your ammunition into glowing orange bits of giant insects or the fleshy melons of human pirates. Lost Planet 2 is, like its predecessor, an extremely straightforward shooter.

After that, you're bundled together and whisked off to a jungle environment for the initial mission proper.Īnd then things seem to get immeasurably less interesting. There's no threat of death, and everything synchronises perfectly, including cutscenes, with a neat boss battle rendezvous at the end. We did eventually realise that Lost Planet 2 does something that, for some reason, isn't commonplace in co-op games: it starts with two teams of players doing entirely different things, and they only reconvene after their own particular prologue. I was starting to wonder if I'd joined the wrong multiplayer session. Unless he'd suddenly transmogrified into Chuck Norris, this scenario seemed unlikely.

I was bleating about mounted guns and flying enemies and he claimed to be piloting the vehicle, which on my screen was a drop ship whistling through a canyon. The Time It took for my co-op buddy and I to wrap our feeble minds around what was happening during Lost Planet 2 prologue was embarrassingly lengthy.

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