Got this one in a Humble Bundle five years ago and never touched it until now. I went in without much interest, due to no previous experience with the franchise, and low expectations. I'd say it wasn't bad. Being a decade old, the main characters facial animations were reliable and even impressive at times. The environments were a little homogenous and got stale pretty quick. Aside from the final area, which I found thrilling. Reminded me a lot of the Impact Crater from Metroid Prime. With the other areas though, they tried to encourage backtracking and exploration, but the landscapes can be so barren and the mech you pilot is so slow and cumbersome that it made it a hassle. I hardly bothered with any secondary objectives because of this, not that the rewards were much to speak of anyway. Don't wanna be completely negative though. The music was really unnerving at times with sinister strings reminiscent of Morricone's The Thing soundtrack. I enjoyed the story and I was genuinely curious about what would happen next. The characters were easy to connect with too, especially the husband/wife dynamic of your character. I found myself surprisingly invested in the relationships being expanded upon along the way. The combat is your standard over-the-shoulder shooter, but it's riddled with really awful QTE's that even permeated the final fight, robbing it of some momentum. I don't think I'll replay it, but I don't regret the once-over. The game also commits the cardinal sin of locking the platinum trophy behind multiplayer trophies which is often the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to replayability.

The Lost Planet series is one of those sad ones you see on "worst of" or "what happened" YouTube videos. The first game is great if not repetitive. It was early in the HD era of gaming and showed off what the Xbox 360 could do. The second game took a serious dive and tried to be a Monster Hunter rip-off and the third game tries to blend both but doesn't do it very well. The biggest strength in Lost Planet 3 is the continued story from the first game and it's done quite well with story twists and surprises, but it's dished out too slowly and the game in between is repetitive and slow.

You play as Jim Peyton. A man who is just using his rig to make some money to send back to Earth for his wife and baby. You are back on E.D.N. III and you are back to work for the NEVEC company just like in the first game, and the story starts out really slow. While you wait for that to pick up you get to learn the two main gameplay loops here. On foot shooting and your rig. The rig is a hulking mech that can't really fight. It's mostly used to trek across small areas to get to an objective and I honestly find this a waste of time. The whole trapesing across areas to get to somewhere isn't done right. The areas are small, there's zero exploration, and it just wastes time. You can eventually unlock fast traveling, but you can only fast travel at the opening of each area. The first 2/3 of the game starts each mission with you doing the same preamble of walking out of the base and then across the same areas dozens of times to get to the objective. When fast travel is unlocked it helps, but why wasn't this an option from the start?

The rig can kind of fight, but it's melee brawling with larger Akrid which are the planet's native creatures you must kill. The same five-six enemies repeat throughout the entire game and it gets old quickly. There are a ton of repeated boss fights in the game and to mix things up (not really) you can fight them in the rig as well. This consists of timed blocks and then using your claw arm to and drill to get at their weak points which glow orange, a series staple. This orange stuff is the lifeblood of the planet and used as currency in-game and is sent back to Earth to solve the energy crisis. The mech itself is very clunky but in a bad way. It feels unresponsive and sluggish to move and the boss fights are never epic feeling or satisfying. The most irritating missions are the ones in which it turns into a drilling platform and you must defend it. These missions last for what seems like forever and you never have good enough weapons for the enemies at hand.

Let's get to the on-foot combat. The weapons here are completely useless. Only the shotgun and assault rifle is any good. The hunting rifle, bowcaster, and grenade launcher are mostly useless. They fire too slow as every single enemy moves fast and swarms you. They only became useful in the final chapter when you finally fight human enemies. The same few enemies repeat. Three small swarming enemy types, two larger giant dog-like creatures, one centipede-like creature that can use cover, and three boss types that repeat often. That's it. The game relies on quick-time events when enemies get too close and especially in the rig. They all move fast and don't benefit from long-range weapons or slow-shooting weapons. You need a lot of ammo to pelt at them to keep them off of you. There are upgrades and weapons to purchase, but you wind up not needing most of them for the other weapons because they are useless. You can also upgrade your rig, but outside of armor there really isn't a reason to do much upgrading.

The entire game is also dull to look at. Sure it looks nice graphically, but artistically the entire game is just ice and snow. There's no variation and it just looks boring. Even the base is boring to be in because it's all ice and snow. I know this is a frozen planet, but there are usually other biomes on every planet type. Mix it up some. Outside of shooting Akrid you are pulling levers, turning knobs, and pressing buttons. There are some scripted events, but the few interior areas are drab and just as boring as the outside. The game has no soul and feels like a typical cookie-cutter shooter. It feels like it tries to be Dead Space 3 sometimes with odd horror music that doesn't fit and the creatures that hide behind cover.

Overall, the game is just so underwhelming. It doesn't have compelling shooting, the weapons suck, the rig is wasted by not having any weapons, and the areas repeat just like the bosses and enemy types. The story is the only thing worth sticking around for, but unless you're a hardcore Lost Planet fan there's no reason to play this. The story is for fans of the original game and newcomers won't get the full impact of the twists in the story. The graphics look nice, and the voice acting is great, but the same repeated ice and snow levels for 10 hours get old really fast. Sadly, this series doesn't end with a bang and there's a reason why Capcom left it in the graveyard.

This is a perfectly mediocre game. I put it on hold because I have other games on hold that I frankly just am looking forward to more. It's a charming gameplay loop of going back and forth with your big ice rig, exploring mechs and the like. It's almost Alien-ish with its big corporation, tough trucker characters. There's just something about it that gets boring. Things don't change or raise at all, and the enemies are often boring or frustrating more than exciting. I'll probably play it again later, but not while I have other sci-fi games like New Vegas or Mass Effect still in the backlog.

Lost Planet 3 is a video game. It's okay.

If that sounds like an underwhelming intro...then I agree with you. It's just that Lost Planet 3 is one of those games that doesn't really sit with you. It's not a bad time; there were some frustrating moments, but every time I was done I felt fine. I also never had the feeling of desperately wanting to play more though. It's one of the most middle-grounded gaming experiences I've had.

The game stars Jim Peyton who is headed for E.D.N. III, a frosty planet, to mine for T-Energy to solve the energy crisis back on Earth. While the premise is simple, the story is one of the better parts of the game; there's a few nice surprises along the way, Jim Peyton himself is written quite well, and the plot keeps you engaged with what's happening all throughout. Tonally, the game does feel somewhat odd. The setting and situation at hand would seemingly lead to more serious and desperate situations, but most of the crew that man the home base are kind of goofy and weird. There's Gale, a young guy who's in charge of your machine and is pretty hyper, a crewman constantly on the lookout for the warmest spot in the base, a kooky scientist, a pair of engineers where one only ever mumbles,... The actual plot never turns goofy, but all the writing around it definitely takes a less serious tone.

Gameplay-wise, Lost Planet 3 is a bog-standard third-person shooter. There's a cover system, but it's only relevant in specific encounters; the majority of the enemies you'll face without any cover, and it doesn't feel like a huge loss in those scenarios either. What is not bog-standard in games however, is the Rig.

See, Jim Peyton doesn't mine with a pickaxe. He uses...well, he uses little posts that absorb energy, but to get there, he uses his Rig. The Rig is basically a big, lumbering machine. Think a Gundam if our current engineers had to seriously build one. Yes, the Rig unfortunately is as lame as it sounds. It's clear that the designers wanted the Rig to be a core aspect of the game, but it just doesn't really work. It's very slow; I wouldn't say that you as a person are faster than the Rig, but it certainly feels that way, so every time you're traversing areas it just feels like it takes forever.

This is exacerbated by fights in the Rig. Whenever you encounter normal enemies (the alien Akrid, endemic to the planet), you can try to kill them with your Rig or get out to shoot them. Shooting them is much quicker and easier; it's not that the Rig doesn't do damage, it's just that hitting them when you're so slow is just a major pain in the behind. Once you encounter bigger Akrid however, you'll generally be locked in your Rig, leading to a fight. These fights generally turn into QTE-events; you block a few attacks, then a scene happens where the Rig grabs the pincer/stinger/arm that was attacking it, you hold it up, and then you use your drill or welder to deal damage. You repeat this a few times, and the enemy Akrid dies. None of these encounters are thrilling; they just feel like a chore. These Rig fights also have problems throughout the game; you can pick up parts to improve your Rig, but at the start, you are not very tough, and the chance of the Rig going down are pretty high. Later on, you'll have gotten a few upgrades like a welder or a shock-claw, but these are tied to story progression, so it's very easy to forget you have them, can use them for combat,...or what button they're tied to. I don't have a perfect memory, but it hasn't happened to me before that I've had to check my keyboard config in the penultimate boss fight.

Technically, the game is okay. I enjoyed the snow planet setting; while snow areas generally get boring after a while, I feel the design of E.D.N. III had enough variety to not have me bored throughout. There's also some great sound design when you're navigating Akrid nests, as it sounds very gross, and icky, and intense. The game does a really good job of tensing you up in areas, potential dread around every corner. It's not a horror game, but it takes inspiration from them for some parts, and the sound is a big part of it. I did have to turn off the Rig radio though; country rock only? No thanks.

All in all, if you just want an enjoyable third-person shooter, you could do quite a lot worse than Lost Planet 3! You could, however, also do better.