Lost Planet 3

TGS: Getting the Job Done in Lost Planet 3

Sometimes the job is "robot boxing champion."

After using a grappling hook to climb into his robo-rig, beardy hero Jim proceeds to punch a space scorpion with his drill fist. This is before he grabs its pointy tail with one of his mech’s arms and uses the other to cut it off, neutering the threat and leaving it exposed for another robot beatdown. All he wanted to do was get a satellite dish open and online. Some days on the job are better than others.

Lost Planet 3’s robot segments, like past Lost Planet games, excel over the competent third-person action. The on-foot shooting bits are fine, but nothing more – little about the linear cover-based shooting galleries in the Tokyo Game Show demo did anything to highlight interesting over-the-shoulder action. But the objectives you work toward while carving through Akrid make sense, give you purpose, and create a great sense of peaks-and-valleys pacing.
Between brief battles with giant mosquitos, Jim has to do his day job. He has to repair sabotaged machinery, get the aforementioned dish working, flick switches, pull levers, and otherwise endure the mundane nature of his 9-5. Akrid just happen to get in the way from time to time. Like Dead Space (to which it draws numerous similarities), Lost Planet 3 manages to assign manual labor without making it a tedious grind. It feels good when you know your mech suit is on its way up a conveyer because you cleaned up a mess of broken machinery. Getting inside to take on frightening bosses feels even better. Lost Planet 3 tries to involve you in the moment to moment events as much as possible, to the point that you need to physically lift the scorpion's held stinger with one arm to expose the weak spot you'll drill into.

I've only played it for a small chunk of time, but this capsule experience with Lost Planet 3 proved that developer Spark Unlimited is on to something with this new direction for the franchise -- something IGN has been excited about before. It's reassuring to see it maintain the series' strengths while shedding the most obvious weaknesses. Where previous Lost Planet campaigns were about lengthy, drawn-out battles with waves of enemy bugs, pirates, or big bosses, Lost Planet 3 throws you through fast-paced set pieces that stick with you.
It has a new purpose, something it strives to achieve, and it's closer to that goal each time we play it.