Lost Planet 3 is Not What You Think

Lost Planet 3 is easily the surprise of the year so far. Where its
predecessors have been team-based third-person shooters, this is a
character- and story-driven game that's as much survival horror as
shooter. Set before the other two Lost Planet stories, it stars a
rugged, red-headed American everyman, Jim, one of the first colonists on
frozen planet E.D.N-III – or so he's told. Jim is one of many workers
who signed up to work in this inhospitable terrain, saving money to
provide for his wife and child back home. He pilots a construction mech,
which he ends up using to drill hostile aliens to death out on the
planet surface as well as move construction supplies around.


The demo begins in a dimly-lit underground facility, where Jim and his
colleagues sleep and rest in between forays out into the wilderness. The
digital acting and facial animation immediately assert that story is
important to this game. Video messages from home – from Jim's wife – add
narrative texture, reinforcing Jim's motivation for braving such
unwelcoming territory. After a brief argument with his boss, Jim is sent
out to investigate an abnormal heat pocket and plant a thermal post to
harvest its energy. Climbing up into the mech's cockpit, he prepares to
head out into the wastes.


This is where that superficial MechWarrior comparison comes in: it seems
that you'll be playing a great deal of Lost Planet 3 inside the mech,
in first-person view. Regulations mean it can't be weaponised, so
there's no Gatling gun on the arm or rocket-launcher on the shoulder a
la Armored Core, but its arms and drill can still be used to fight. The
rig has to be de-iced and kept running if it's to survive outside – go
too far into the storms and it'll freeze up and leave Jim out in the
cold.

Outside on the planet surface, Lost Planet 3 maintains its predecessor's
main achievement: depicting a frighteningly believable frozen world,
with equally hostile inhabitants. Through the mech's windscreen, you can
see electrical storms brewing in the distance and violent blizzards
billowing across the distant tundra. The low sun glares off the
compacted snow, and inside – in crevices, caves and bases sheltered from
the wilderness – there are luminescent stalagmites of ice.


There's an ever-present sense of danger that comes both from the
environment itself and the ever-present possibility that a gigantic
Akrid could rise from beneath the ice at any moment. Inside the mech,
you fight with the machine's arms and drill; outside, the view reverts
to third-person, and you shoot up the aliens with shotguns, rifles,
grenades and whatever else comes to hand. Sometimes, you'll have to use a
combination of these two tactics – we see Jim trap a large enemy in a
headlock inside the mech before jumping out to empty shotgun shells into
its glowing, orange underside. The aliens range from swift, mammalian
predators to the series' trademark enormous insects.


Jim can hop in and out of the rig at any time, but there are places
where the mech can't fit through, and he has to go alone. The further
away he gets, the weaker his communications become; outside of the
machine, there's no mini-map to guide you. The first-person view
accentuates the scale and power of the rig; outside, on his own, Jim is
very exposed. A grappling hook lets him explore higher ground.


It's when Jim plants his thermal post in a cave – the thermal posts that
you used in Lost Planets 1 and 2 were all originally planted by earlier
colonists like Jim – that the game starts to reveal its survival horror
credentials. As the ice melts in seconds, it reveals an abandoned base –
a base that shouldn't be there, if Jim really is among the first humans
ever to set foot on the planet. Inside, Lost Planet 3 shows flashes of
Dead Space. There are ruined, ominously dark corridors, scuttling and
screeching sounds from the vents above, locked doors and dead
generators. Some of the audio cues are straight out of Alien, and even
the holographic display that Jim can bring up in front of him is
reminiscent of Isaac Clarke's.


When scuttling aliens burst from the walls to attack Jim, he's forced to
stab them through the head rather than shoot - close-up combat in the
base looks very different from the shooting mechanics on the outside,
which look very similar in feel to classic Lost Planet combat. The
reveal presentation culminated in yet another fight with the Akrid after
Jim escapes the base, leaving him in an extremely precarious position
between a deadly storm and a crowd of very pissed-off giant alien crabs.


Over the course of this one mission, the atmosphere changed
significantly with each new scenario. Inside the abandoned base things
were tense and slow-paced; outside of the mech, the shooting is
deliberate but weighty, whereas within the mech Jim is much less
exposed, and combat looks more powerful. The sense of exploration here
is stronger than it has been in any Lost Planet game to date. With the
hangar as a base, you can easily see how Lost Planet 3 will develop as
you explore further and further out, and figure out exactly what
happened on this planet that nobody wants to admit to.


What makes all of this even more surprising is that Lost Planet 3 is
being developed in collaboration with Spark, an American studio whose
previous games have been… well, pretty awful. Perhaps the guidance (and budget) offered by Capcom, including the original Lost Planet team, has enabled the studio to better show off its talent.


Atmospheric, innovative and completely unexpected, Lost Planet 3 has
catapulted itself onto the list of games to watch for 2013 on the
strength of a single demo. The next time Lost Planet 3 shows its face,
it will be met with a lot more interest.