The biting winter winds howl madly, ripping the warmth from your body. In a snowstorm haze the ground trembles and tears apart beneath you, like a fragile eggshell, only to reveal a monstrous worm hundreds of feet tall clamoring for your frozen flesh.

Welcome to Lost Planet, a new planet colonized by the human race for valuable resources, only in this artic wasteland another race of beings call this place home- the Akrid. Essentially the main enemy you will encounter for the game, a variety of insect like creatures that once defeated you can reap the warmth from their corpses.

You play as a Wayne, a VS pilot (mech pilot) with a special device attached to his arm known as the harmonizer, this device transfers warmth to life energy. Energy is another bar you have in the game besides your health. This energy bar constantly descreases as your warmth is drained by exploring the winter wonderland around you. You gain energy by killing enemies, (which there is always an ample supply of) or by blowing up tankers or other pieces of the environment. Everytime an enemy succesfully hits you the harmonizer drains your warmth and converts it to health.

You start the story with barely any memorys and join a ragtag group of surviors known as space pirates, together you will explore a portion of the world and find out what happened to your missing father and if there are other people on the world.

What this game basically devolves to is eleven breif missions (I finished the game in just under 8 hrs) comprised mainly of shooting many, many bugs. Lost Planet plays as a basic third person shooter, with several weapons at your disposal, ranging from machinguns, to shotguns and rocket launchers. From time to time you get to pilot Vital Suits (mechs) for increased firepower. A good half portion on the game is spent riding around in these suits, but you will neat them to combat your numerous foes.

Also at your side at all times is your trusty grappling hook, which you can use to traverse the terrain in some of the basic platforming elements to the game. Unfortunatley the grappling hook is a largley wasted potential as you can only grapple once and then either climb up or down, you can't regrapple midswing ala Bionic Commando, which would have been a lot more fun.

The game plays like an oldschool arcade shooter where you shoot everything and anything that isn't you. Even more of a shout out to the gaming days of yore is the weakspot your enemies have.. each Akrid is marked with a glowing red spot (or concentraion on thermal energy) for you to target, which means you get to blow of some spider like legs, or shoot giant Akrid in the eyes and whatnot. The game has a great fast pace to start off with, that beings to falter horribly come the fourth or fifth mission.

Many missions begin to feel unrewarding as you are constantly shooting things, just to progress. The highlight of the entire game is the fantastic boss battles you are rewarded with at the end of each mission. Oftentimes you will fight gigantic, prehistoric Akrid, or other powerfull Vital Suits in some mech on mech combat.

The graphics are fantasitic and the game conveys its artic atmosphere extremley well. The explosion and smoke effects in particular are some of the best we have seen yet. So much so that in the heat of some tense boss fights, with multiple rockets going off the smoke becomes thich and its hard to see what is going on, which ultimatley results in you getting blasted unfairly by the boss in question.

Overall the game is very short, and the pacing issues and monotony certainly don't help. I reccomend a buy at bargin prices later on, or a rental, but it is not worth the full price of admission. The story is completly throw away (Didn't Starship Troopers cover this first?), and the gameplay is fun at times but not often enough.

This is one Lost Planet best left unexplored.