Minor annoyance, but an issue nonetheless.Speaking of minor problems, Lost Planet 2 looks amazing, but the character’s eyes don’t move. For some reason you can descend quite a long way showing how long your grappling hook is, but to manually use it you have to be within 10-15 feet from the object you wish to grapple to. When you walk off a cliff, your grappling hook will automatically attach to the cliff keeping you from falling (an extraordinarily handy feature that saved me numerous times), and from there you can slowly descend to the ground. The grappling mechanic is fun but you can’t grapple while jumping and its range needs to be longer. Some people, usually those who haven’t spent much time with the game, might take a little longer to beat the level.After all that the rest of my issues with the game aren’t as serious. This tends to take somewhere between 5-15 minutes, depending on the level of ignorance of the players currently in the game. Usually you’ll have to wait patiently in the Lobby, all by your lonesome, singing tunes from your childhood as the other players kick tons of Akrid ass. Then there’s that whole ‘Start Over’ issue I complained about before you’ll have to contend with.For a game that prides itself on its action-packed co-operative feature, the absence of a drop-in/drop-out feature is rather glaring, and the Matchmaking really doesn’t help this since you don’t have the option of filtering the results to only get games that are waiting in the Lobby. For example, if you need to defend a couple of important locations against waves of enemies, you won’t know that you need to do this until you’re greeted with a Mission Failed screen. Occasionally you’ll be gifted with a Mission Briefing, but most of the time you’re on your own. Not fun.This game also fails to explain your objectives when you enter an area. Each Episode takes roughly 30-45 minutes to complete so if you have a life or die somewhere, you will have to start at the beginning. Lost Planet 2 doesn’t seem to care how much progress you lose since the only checkpoints can be found at the beginning of the Episodes. However, most of the games that don’t include this feature add a plethora of checkpoints to keep you from losing too much progress.
You might say that many games don’t give you the ability to save, to which I’ll reply yes, you are correct. First off the list is the inability to save. Well, it’s not, but it’s certainly plagued by some frustratingly large problems. In no way is Lost Planet 2 a bad game, and I say that because I might initially make the game sound like it was utterly terrible.
Find out just how big and ugly these new problems are and whether or not they drop the game from a buy to a rental. It successfully managed the latter, but somehow the developers seem to have taken a few steps back instead of the few issues we had with the original game they decided to introduce new ones. All Lost Planet 2 had to do was build off of the snowy, akrid-infested mech action that was its predecessor, and perhaps throw in a few “sequel must-haves” like online co-op or bigger bosses.