Lost Planet's tight controls and interesting mix of on-foot and in-mech action make it a great game.
One of the best things about Lost Planet has to be the fact that all of it feels so tight. I don't mean tight as in, "Dude, this is tight!", but I mean in like the game feels like it's almost perfect. The controls are perfectly mapped and the action never reaches a level where it feels too out of control for you to handle. All of the difficulty levels, while each having their own frustrating points here and there, never feel like they need any kind of tweaking or restructuring. The visuals are top notch - there are quite a few scenes where you can almost tell yourself you're watching a movie; most notably in the opening sequence. The smoke effects are all great, even though you can tell they're not really traditional particles - but they still fit in somehow. It's funny how they did that. Lastly, the way the game bounces you between on-foot action and action taking place inside the various mech units in the game is fantastic. While you're on foot, you'll be happy to see a discarded mech lying around and once you power it up, it's like you're in heaven. The mechanics for either on-foot action on in-mech action aren't terribly complicated, which makes Lost Planet accessible to those which might find other shooters too daunting for their tastes.
The Bad
As mentioned above, each difficulty has moments every once in a while that can be extremely frustrating. One example is a boss fight about halfway through the game in which you simply can't see anything because every attack it lets off completely fills your screen with smoke, which you can't see through. The fight is more trial and error than anything else and you can expect to die a few times. In the story area, while the story is fairly compelling given the3 nature of the game and story scenes take place as intermission periods in between "mission," some of the intermission scenes can end a bit abruptly, leaving you with no real closure from the last mission. In addition, the game throws a little too many plot twists at you for your own good, introducing characters in the storyline which appear only once and the completely disappear without any real reason.