Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is an exceptional alien shooter that delivers well on all standards.
In this game you play as a character named Wayne, he was found buried under the snow, and knows nothing of what's going on. Nevertheless, like in every game you must be the hero, and in this case you must use a slick array of weapons, gadgetry and mech suits to destroy your enemies and harvest their heat sources so that humans may use it to take over other planets and live there happily. Along the way you will meet a small cast of clever characters, and will move throughout a large variety of scenery. However, the story is eventually buried deep under the intense action.
The game has an extremely easy to pick up and learn control scheme and you will notice immediately that your surroundings are nothing short of incredible. You step into a rich detailed world with these crazy aliens popping out of everywhere. Even though the world is very detailed, the powerful Xbox 360 is able to keep the game running smoothly and it never gets messy, and the game is able to keep a consistent frame rate, that might only very rarely jump a bit.
Amazingly the sound is able to keep up with everything going on on screen. Everything that is happening on screen has a sound. The mech suit movement, guns, and the screams of the horrid aliens, name just a few of the incredibly done sounds you with witness. Also adding to the drama is some decent voice acting, although there have been better voices in other games.
As you jump through the different scenery you'll probably never be to surprised with what you find. Enemies, weapons, and the mech suites seem to stay pretty much the same throughout all the missions. And there is no variety at all when it comes to collecting, the only collectibles are those orange heat balls that fall out of the aliens.
All these things are great, but the single player campaign doesn't last very long at all, so that's when players should jump over to the sixteen player online mode. The online consists of four modes. There are the classic death matches and team death matches. There is also a Fugitive mode where everybody must hunt one player. Lastly there is the Capture the Post mode, which is probably the most clever mode, where teams must capture all the data posts to achieve victory. The data posts, are another source of thermal energy both in the single player campaign and in the multiplayer.
The shooter has been done many times on Microsoft consoles, but this game is a new way to approach this game genre. Lost Planet is hardly slowed down by load times, and keeps consistency in all categories, and although it may be short, it has 3 difficulty settings that should each be tried, and a decent multiplayer mode. In the end Lost Planet should be a game in most Xbox 360 owners' library.