Co-op seems to be one of the “hey look at me” features of this generation. Many games seem to negatively impact their single player campaigns for the sake of making their co-op experience better. Games like Army of Two, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, Borderlands and Gears of War are meant to be played with a friend but work perfectly fine playing single player.

Lost Planet 2 however has taken these examples to the extreme and instead of just impacting the single player experience in gameplay it also forces players to use the clumsy co-op menus for single player. Do not mistake it for anything else; this is a co-op game first, single player second. Due to the clumsy co-op centric menus, bad checkpoints and seemingly unscaled difficulty it can create a major annoyance to play with less than two people.

This would be slightly forgivable if the save points were spread out simmilar to a singleplayer game, unfortunately this isn’t the case. Also Unlike most games released now days, a checkpoint is not a save point. You need to play a whole episode, which could be up to an hour long in single player. If you exit half way through an episode you need to start it over again. To imagine the developers want you to get 4 people together online for an hour or so to make any progress is just ridiculous.

As would be expected due to the co-op nature of the game, the focus on the single player AI has been (seemingly) very small; nearly every enemy will target you, and only you, while the friendly AI that is always around, only pretends to aim at the enemy and do damage.

It is a shame that the game is trying so hard to make people not want to play it. At its heat is a decent third person shooter that has some giant enemies that are fun to face, especially in the VS suits (Mechs) that sometimes (literally) surround the battlefield. The controls feel nice and weighty, more so than Gears of War, and while it takes a while to get used to them its great that the game has done something different against the all too fammiliar "me too" games out on the market.

While it seems a lot of short cuts have been taken with the game’s menus and the graphics in general, the game still looks good from a distance. With the textures standing out as being very muddy but that is forgivable when you are firing rockets that are hitting a 10 story monster while you fly around it in a mech. Anyone who complains about that is crazy, anyone who still complains about that when you have 3 mates helping you to blow that same monster up is utterly insane because it can be one of the best co-op experiences around if you are willing to put up with the rest of the faults in the game.

One complaint that a lot of people have made is against the grappling hook; things like the distance it has and when it can be used have been criticised. I really think Lost Planet 2 was just unlucky that Just Cause 2 came out before it. People seemed to want the grappling hook to feel the same. After learning the rules that apply to the grappling hook it became a lot less frustrating when I die because of it, I knew it was my fault, and can we ask much more from a game mechanic?

This is where in the review where I would tell you about the story but I’m not sure what to tell you about it; it is a disjointed mess that could have been really good. Set on a foreign planet, E.D.N. III within every style of environment that has been done to death taking on massive monsters called Akrids. What’s not to like about that? Well In different chapters you play as unnamed characters from different factions with a tiny bit of narrative in the first half of the game given in a few cut scenes, You never really know what you are doing, where you are or why you are doing what you are doing. So those who need narrative to drive them forward should leave this game on the shelf,

Lost Planet 2 is a frustrating game to review; for every good point it has, it has two bad ones. While playing the game it can be a blast, but the frustration it can bring makes me hesitant to recommend to anyone but a bunch of mates that are looking for a purely co-op experience to kill a bit of time. For anything else there are a lot of games released this year that are more worthy of your money. Sorry Lost Planet 2, you almost had me, why did you have to ruin what could have been a great relationship.