Back in January 2007, Capcom released Lost Planet: Extreme Condition on the Xbox 360 and it was fairly successful, selling 1.45 million units. PC and Playstation 3 ports soon followed, but Capcom clearly felt they could milk this cash cow a little more. They fed their cash cow some additional content and what exuded from its udders was the horrendously triple-titled Lost Planet: Extreme Condition - Colonies Edition.
If I was being harsh I could sum up LPECCE as ‘Starship Troopers on Ice’. Sure, this game does feature vicious insectoid aliens on a hostile otherworldly planet, but Lost Planet makes you feel more like a one-man extermination force than a soldier in the RoughNecks, and the glacial setting really is the crux of the whole game.
Few 21st Century scientists could have hoped to forsee the brutal forms which evolved from the seemingly inert substance: ’Jaffa Cakes’.
Strangely, ‘Lust Magnet: Rapid Attrition - Carbon Emissions’ is clearly aimed at gamers who have already played through Capcom’s frigid classic and are still thirsty for more. This is evidenced by the additional features this re-release has gained, including a mode that lets you fight through the boss battles consecutively, before you’ve even played through them in the main Story mode.
It seems an oversight then, that ‘Frost Blanket: Pointless Addition - Comedies Division’ is not compatible with an existing Lost Planet saved game. The new Unlimited mode, allows players to rush through the main game with super-abilities such as greater speed, infinite ammo, more powerful weapons and no need to reload. This would’ve been a fantastic bit of freedom and fun for Lost Planet veterans, had they not had to play through the whole single-player campaign again to unlock this.
I suppose I must mention the utterly worthless addition of a first-person camera mode, which completely fails to approximate the experience of playing an FPS. Instead, it feels like playing a highly agile third-person game in which you cannot see your character. Needless to say this doesn’t serve to increase your enjoyment of the game.
The third and final additional single-player mode is Score Attack, and this is the mode that shows the most potential. As mentioned earlier, the arctic premise is central to the mechanics of this game. The player-character has a Thermal Energy meter, which is constantly depleting due to the titular extreme conditions. This ‘T-Eng’ is also linked to health regeneration, and an empty meter ensures a swift death. The interesting part is that T-Eng is most commonly found in the frozen corpses of enemies that you’ve recently dispatched. On normal difficulty levels there is rarely the danger of succumbing to the elements, but on tougher difficulties heat escapes faster than Harry Houdini.
