Lost Planet: Extreme Condition isn’t a hard game to like.  Chances are you’ve played games just like this one already, and you’ve had fun.  With that in mind, it’s definitely a tall order not to enjoy this one.

The storyline is interesting enough–basically, due to a series of disasters back on Earth that the game never strictly defines, humanity, as led by the Neo-Venus Construction group, has left Earth to colonize an outer planet.  They’ve settled on E.D.N. III (pronounced, not surprisingly, Eden), a frozen mudball of a planet that seems to be at least usable.  It doesn’t take long for human construction to annoy the planet’s previously undiscovered indigenous life, the Akrid, which are basically enormous insects.  Humanity, of course, doesn’t much relish the thought of taking on gigantic bugs until they discover that these massive insects produce and store within their bodies a kind of energy source that enables them to exist in the planet E.D.N. III’s harsh conditions.  They call it thermal energy, or T-ENG, and it’s an extremely potent energy source.  Taking the T-ENG, the humans use it in the development of Vital Suits, giant walking battlemechs that mount sufficiently heavy weapons to turn back even the Akrid.

You, meanwhile, step in as Wayne Holden, an amnesiac who remembers how to pilot one of these Vital Suits, and holder of a mysterious device called a Harmonizer that allows Wayne to directly metabolize T-ENG.  And over the course of the game, you’ll fight the Neo-Venus Construction group in an attempt to free E.D.N III from both them and the Akrid.

Like I said, it’s the kind of game you’ve played plenty of times before.  Take the earlier console title Earth Defense Force 2017–if you put that on a snowy planet and replaced all the vehicles with mechs, then improved the graphics and added on a better story, you’d have Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.  Oh, don’t get me wrong—it’s fun enough to play.  I love games where you can just run around and blast stuff on a fairly linear path with lots of different weapons.  And indeed, you get PLENTY of weapons.  You get the standard machine gun, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, hand grenades, and that’s just for starters before you even get to the first mech.  You’ll get to swing around with a grappling hook cannon and you’ll even get the opportunity to detach mech weapons and carry them around with you like normal guns.  It’s downright exciting to carry a gatling gun around with you and blast everything in sight while you walk around, but it does come at the cost of severely slowing your character down.

That’s part of the game’s biggest problem—character control.  Playing you out of the mech seems to play a lot smoother, but comes at the cost of severely reduced firepower.  Getting behind the controls of a Vital Suit gives you vastly improved firepower but the thing handles like a brick on a string.  I also had a problem in some places figuring out just where to go next, but these problems never lasted long as there’s usually only one right way to go.  It’s just never always clear.

So all things considered, if you don’t mind an Xbox 360 game that’s heavy on the derivative, light on the originality, and extremely heavy on the bang-bang, then you’ll downright love Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.