{"id":857,"date":"2010-05-21T10:52:55","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T17:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/?p=857"},"modified":"2010-05-21T10:52:55","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T17:52:55","slug":"lost-planet-2-campaign-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/lost-planet-2-campaign-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Planet 2 Campaign Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nLost Planet 2<\/a> might be the game that I have the most mixed feeling about this year. It has a lot of little things that really bug me.\u00a0 Like that as you earn points in the game to unlock new weapons and abilities you can\u2019t actually pick which ones you want to unlock. Instead you \u201cspend\u201d your points on a slot machine that randomly gives you whatever it wants.\u00a0 There are literally dozens of weapons in the game that I\u2019ve not even tried yet because I have not unlocked them.\u00a0 It is not that I could not finish the game without them, because I did, but just that I don\u2019t have the option.\u00a0 Even if you had to use the points to progress up a weapon tree would be better if it gave me some control over which weapon types I unlocked. Additionally the series of loading and confirmation screens to get a game started is ridiculous. I don\u2019t need confirm my save game location twice and then confirm I want to load the co-op invite I just accepted and then finally confirm that I am joining the room.\u00a0 Just automatically do all that stuff.\u00a0 The other thing I find lame is that with the full campaign being 4 player co-op you still can\u2019t drop in\/out whenever you want.\u00a0 You can only do it between missions.<\/p>\n

Once you get through the menu and actually get your game going things take a drastic change for the better.\u00a0 The campaign is an absolute blast to play co-op.\u00a0 Going it solo is doable but much more difficult as your teammate AI guys tend to just follow you around and shoot at whatever you are.\u00a0 When you have 4 players working the mission objectives together you can split up and take them on from multiple sides.\u00a0 On some missions you don\u2019t even get a choice in this because the story line splits putting each pair of teammates in different areas from the start.\u00a0 The missions tend to follow a predictable arc of kill a few minor enemies and then face a massive boss. I thoroughly enjoyed this pacing because I always knew that there was something bigger and badder to fight coming up soon.<\/p>\n

I also enjoyed how the campaign is broken into 6 episodes like a tv mini-series.\u00a0 Each episode focuses on the story from a different group\u2019s perspective with the final episode tying all of the stories together.\u00a0 Some of the story sections were a lot more humorous than others with some funny character interactions while others were somber and tragic. \u00a0The story itself takes place 12 years after the events in Lost Planet.\u00a0 The core elements of fighting Akri, using VS suits and trying to get T-Gen remain but the world itself has changed a lot.\u00a0 There are still some sections of ice and snow but there are also jungle, desert and even space based missions.\u00a0 The variety of mission locations was a nice change from the original.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t expect to get a lot of achievements as they are few and far between.\u00a0 It is a completion\u2019s nightmare as it will take about 14 times playing through the game to unlock a few of the achievements.\u00a0 But, if you\u2019re looking for a fun game to play with some Lost Planet 2 well worth trying. The boss fights are challenging but fun, and the story\u2019s plot is a nice change from most shooters that spend the whole game with one main character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lost Planet 2 might be the game that I have the most mixed feeling about this year. It has a lot of little things that really bug me.\u00a0 Like that as you earn points in the game to unlock new weapons and abilities you can\u2019t actually pick which ones you want to unlock. Instead you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[141,7,5],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-xbox-360","tag-lost-planet-2","tag-review","tag-video-game"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}