Lost planet demo review
After positive reviews and lack of a XB360, my curiosity drove me to download the PC DirectX9 version and give it a shot. I’m not a big first person(/over-the-shoulder) shooter person, but I do enjoy a good game of Battle field(1942 DC or 2), Quake3 arena, and even Metroid Prime: Hunters. I dislike Halo because I find it a bit bland, slow, and even a bit broken. Luckily -from what I hear- I think Halo 3 seems to have fixed all that, but this isn’t about Halo or other XB360 shooters -This is spartaaaaa about Lost planet(sorry, I had to).
First thing I did when I got the demo was run the performance test to see if my computer could actually handle this game. Luckily it ran quite well at a solid 60 to 45 frames. The worst being about 26 frames in some areas of the second performance test. I took my own screen-shots for this and even though there’s a huge resolution difference between this and the 360 the graphics are somewhat comparable. Of course getting hung up on graphics is pretty pointless as long as the game runs at a solid frame rate.
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Lost planet not only looks good but plays great as well. The first mission(w/2 acts) is a bug fest where you rip apart the “Akrid” and their spawning holes(I wonder if there’s a in-game term for those…). In a way it feels a lot like Resident evil4 at first: Mindless zombies enemies? Check. Over the shoulder camera? Check. Guns? Check. Moving on to the second mission though you encounter “snow pirates” which actually have AI, good AI too. It’s not broken like James Bond: Everything or Nothing where the AI bots can somehow hear you standing up behind them while around a corner. In lost planet if you shoot at them from a distance they’ll actually look around and shoot if they see you. At the same time you can effectively sneak up on them. Effectively planning your route also seems to actually be worthwhile in preventing you from running out of “T-eng” and getting killed. With that in mind, there’s multiple ways to tackle this stage and the best way(IMO) is to be stealthy. I won’t go too much in detail(this is already a bit late!) but combine the open-endness, with good controls and gameplay, and you’ve got a solid game here.
A few glitches with the music, I had to turn it off. I’m just going to dismiss it as a demo glitch or something. The sound effects were great on their own anyways.
The final thought here is to compare it to the 360 version. “Which one is worth buying?” you might ask. I found the graphics not to be so important -in fact the snow was sometimes very annoying- so if your computer can handle the demo at a solid frame rate like mine, then I see no reason to buy a XB360 for this game. If it can’t run it at all or something then it might be worth it. Whatever you do though don’t go out and upgrade your computer to be the ultimate Vista machine for the DX10 version. Heck, even if you plan to make a really powerful machine it’s not really worth switching to Vista for this game.
Screen-shots below:
XB360 comparison pictures via IGN
Mine:
