it's a bit like Monster Hunter with guns in the grand boss fights
Lost Planet is a lot like Monster Hunter, when it comes to the boss fights (both games were made by Capcom for those that don't know). So far I have beaten missions 1-4, and the actual mission stuff is easy enough. But my god man, these boss fights can be infuriating. I was getting a smidge rage-y with mission 3 and mission 4's boss fights last night, because of artificial difficulty with those two bosses. Allow me to vent:
There's no lock-on to target, so you're always having to manually track the camera. All these buttons on this controller, but not a single one locks on to an enemy.
Constant huge explosions kicking up ridiculous amounts of opaque dust, completely obscuring the player's view of everything. You just have to blind fire hoping you hit the boss while choking on dust. Why couldn't all this dust be transparent?
Explosions also cause ground rumble, which makes your character literally fall over on the ground. Dude just keels over like a drunkard. Takes him forever to get back up. Soon as you get back up, you're getting exploded to the ground again.
Ground rumble also temporarily disables your mech if you're in one. How dumb is that? The ground shakes and suddenly your big ass 10 ton mech just stands still immobile, meanwhile it's getting pummeled by the boss. Oh you can jump and hover to avoid that! Except your mech has a delay to jump, then when it hovers, the hover lasts literally about 2 seconds, then it's back on the ground again, with another delay before it can start moving. Artificial delays everywhere that screw the player is straight up old school Monster Hunter.
The mechs you can use are made of metallic tissue paper. You want to use the mechs so you can move better while wielding heavy weapons, because heavy weapons actually hurt the bosses. But after 2 or 3 hits your tissue paper mech is toast. And you can't just eject with a button press, oh no, you have to pummel the shit out of the B button over and over to eject. This game has a hard on for making the player button mash B to do many things actually, it's weirdly annoying.
So then you grab the heavy weapons off the blown up mech, lugging them around by hand. You can still shoot a heavy weapon by hand, but it makes your movement speed slug slow. Meanwhile the boss moves quickly, obliterating you while you're simply trying to line up even one shot. You get your shot lined up, but then the boss blows your ass into the air. Causing loads of opaque dust, and your guy slowly drags his ass back up off the ground, then slowly picks up his big weapon, and you try again...
Even without a heavy weapon, your character runs stupidly slow. Wayne runs like an 80 year old man wearing lead boots. This guy's half my age and I could run circles around him. I end up just jumping around constantly, because that's faster than the sloth run.
The thermal energy crap is basically a death timer. So you can't take your time fighting bosses, because as soon as your thermal energy runs out, you freeze to death. This forces the player to have to expose themselves more often trying to fight quickly, which is invalidated by all the bullshit above.
Both mission 3 and 4's bosses reminded me of
Dark Souls bosses, in that they are extremely aggressive, constantly attacking the player. That works in
Dark Souls because that game gives you the right design, the right camera, the right physics, the right weapons and the right controls, to deal with such things. But
Lost Planet is so inept in its inherent design, that the boss fight difficulty feels totally artificial and cheap.
So yeah I'm not loving
Lost Planet right now.
At present I'd give it a 6/10. It's clearly an ambitious game for 2006, but also clearly a rushed one, with Capcom trying to get a game out quickly for the new (at the time) Xbox 360 platform. I'd mostly call this a straight up third person shooter rather than an action-adventure, it's more arcade-oriented. The only real "fun" I've had with it, is simply overcoming the bullshit boss fights, and the feeling of victory that gives you over such crap odds. But the moment-to-moment game design (going through the levels) isn't particularly interesting or novel. The OST sucks too, being Hollywood styled bombast, rather than low key electronica a frozen-future-tech game like this should have had. Right now
Lost Planet's just barely good enough for me to keep going. Maybe the game design will somehow become better in upcoming missions, and maybe upcoming boss fights will be better balanced than the last two. We'll see...