Review by: Jeff McAllister

The original Lost Planet followed the story of Wayne, Luka, Rick, and Yuri Solotov on the planet EDN III and their hunt for T-Eng Thermal Energy. While the story wasn’t terribly exciting, it was still a story that started at the beginning of the game and finished at the end. The writers of the sequel decided to start the story about six hours in, while leaving you to scratch your head for the first five.

In each chapter of you take the role of a different faction of fighters. One chapter it is the NEVEC soldiers, in another the Jungle Pirates and so on throughout the game. It’s not until the sixth and final episode that the game actually starts to put some effort towards letting you know what is going on. Each character you take the role of is a faceless, nameless, John Doe that you really couldn’t care less about. Not only does your character have no remarkable qualities, neither does the – up to three - companions you can have along for the ride.

Lost Planet 2 is a co-op focused game, and even when playing the single player campaign offline, it doesn’t stop trying to be a co-operative experience. If you are playing alone, you can have at the most three computer controlled teammates that are about as useless as a book that teaches you how to read. The AI players rarely do anything to actually help out and at more times than I could count, they weren’t even near the action, and other times they would hover around data posts that need to be activated instead of doing so.

There are specific spots in the game, particularly during boss fights, that teamwork is needed and the AI just doesn’t cut it. The single player “co-op” experience even extends to the actual gameplay mechanics where if you die, you will respawn after a three second countdown and when you reach the end of an area, you will need to hang around for up to 15 seconds while another counter ticks away on screen. While the co-op feeling isn’t all that spectacular offline, the actual real online co-op has its own issues. The game doesn’t support drop in and drop out and players can’t join sessions that are further into the game then they are in their own.