Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (Mulitplayer Review)
- January 12, 2007 11:10 AM PST
- Email this!
It's bad enough that Lost Planet doesn't fulfill its single player potential, but it also manages to continuously fumble in the online realm as well. If you're looking for smooth matchmaking, engaging action, and multiplayer strategy, grab a copy of Gears of War or Rainbow Six Vegas instead.
Looking for our review of Lost Planet's single-player component? Look no further: it's waiting for you right here!
The Lost Planet online demo landed on Xbox 360 a while back, and rather than serving as a pre-release showcase for the game, it unveiled a startling lack of attention to detail. You can call it a "work in progress" all you want, but if what you're really offering amounts to an open beta, you're better off being straight with your audience about it. Unfortunately, though many "suggestions" have been implementedbold, innovative things like readable text, and letting players actually choose their teams before killing each othermany roadblocks remain.
It begins with the slipshod matchmaking experience. For most sane people, "quick match" means you want the network to drop you in a game that's just about to get started. Instead, you get a laundry list of matches. Alright, you think, simple enough to choose one, right? Wrong. See, if the person that created the game decides to quit, rather than playing it smart and handing the keys over to whomever is next on the list, Capcom's servers just dump everyone back to the opening menu.
Network Wet Work
Assuming you're tenacious enough to actually make it into a match, it's entirely possible, if not maddeningly likely, that you'll be immediately faced with a "network error" message, dumping you back to square one. Anecdotal evidence suggests this is a result of the creator of the match ditching before things get started, but it's certainly irritating regardless of the cause.
This sort of nonsense is presumably addressable with a future patch(Aren't you thrilled that Xbox 360 owners are being treated to the "release now, patch later" myopia that plagues PC gamers?)but the major multiplayer gameplay issues probably aren't. The biggest problem is the pace: whether you're on foot or in a mech, just getting to where the action is on any given map takes too long. In fact, everything takes too long, from activating comm towers with a sequence of B-button pounding that seems to take forever, to digging slow-poke mechs out from under a virtual avalanche of the white stuff.
Out in the Cold
Worst of all, when you do get into a firefight, play offers nothing comparable to the exploding giblet satisfaction of taking out an Akrid monster. Save for the endless tumbling caused by explosives, there's no reaction when you hit an opponent with a flurry of bullets: no blood spray, no stumbling, no aural feedback, nothing. You just keep unloading in his direction, and hope eventually he falls down. Repeat until the match is over.
Perhaps the maps were all built with 16 players in mind, but even on the off-chance you get a full squad of competent, communicative players together, most environments are simply too large, and full of extraneous momentum-killing nooks and crannies, pulled as they are from the single player game with little modification. Judging from the number of times we heard "where is everybody?" per minute, we're not alone in feeling isolated.
It's a real shame, because just as the single player campaign could've come out so much better than it actually did, so has the anticipated online mode dug itself a thankless trench of unfulfilled promise and mediocre execution. We can only hope that Capcom takes an honest look back at what went wrong here, and learns enough to develop and polish their future efforts fully before forcing them from the igloo.
Fun Factor: 2.5
