Despite gritting my teeth so hard they have developed a classy craquelure, I continue to play Lost Planet. The icebugs are enormous, beautiful, and deeply gratifying, and the explosions truly bring me joy. So far, these two things keep me going.
I read a comment somewhere, by someone, that Lost Planet's entire control scheme makes you feel constantly as if you are wading chest-deep through snow. Which, in fact, you are. But there's a difference between enjoying a well-presented illusion of movement, and being so stymied by oppressive trudging that you have to smother screams.
Gears has a certain amount of weight to its movements as well, but they do a good job of meshing heft and power to create the illusion of controlling an obscenely massive character. Lost Planet really makes you feel every layer of Gortex between Wayne, the player character, and his deadly-cold surroundings. It feels exactly like your mother made you put on three snowsuits before kicking you out into a Chicago winter.
They've implented a combination floating reticle/shoulder button instant-45-degree-turn that just doesn't make sense: if Wayne can spin so goddamned fast, why is he such a slouch in all other things? He also has a 12-foot vertical leap. Which he takes four minutes to recover from, making jumping away from things all but useless. It ends up taking you the same amount of time to walk there.
The saving grace is that they have more control scheme options than I have bothered to explore, so switching to a more traditional control scheme was easy.
There's also a vertical aim limit that makes it impossible to shoot directly overhead. This is irritating, as a great many of the icebugs can jump and/or fly.
But the heaviest tarnish on Lost Planet are the ridiculously bad cutscenes and voice acting, all of which are so hackneyed and boring that you may as well be watching
Advent Children with the AC cranked. The "snow pirates" are particularly pathetic; their corny Russian-accented death cries range from
"MOTHER!" to "WHY ME?!??" And they have no AI to speak of, preferring to simply stand there as you blast them with a Gatling.
In closing, I will give Lost Planet grudging nods for making the main character actually asian.
