There’s no denying Gears of War is a great looking game, but now I think it has a little competition! Lost Planet looks great from every aspect. The character models look great… they are on-par with GoW and surpass those in Zelda: Twilight Princess. Buildings and landscapes look great.. if you look at the floor of a cave, you can tell it is uneven. Cars buried in the snow have a light dusting on their roofs, and old buildings still have signs that you can read even from a distance. The Akrid look great, and their sheer massive numbers is scary. Green Eye looks a bit like a dodongo (or giant lizard for those who aren’t Zelda nerds) with the face of a squid… the weird tentacles and eyes really freak me out. Imagine the creepiest bugs you can think of enlarged to the size of a house…
Bosses are nothing to smirk at either. The bosses are enormous compared to Wayne, somehow relating the sheer magnitude of the fight and your odds of loosing. Luckily many Vital Suits are available for use during the battles, so as you exhaust one VS, there may be several others available for you to use. Each boss as a life meter shown on the bottom of the screen. Shooting the boss or throwing grenades at it is a good plan, but surprisingly there is an even better, more obvious target. The place where each bad guy and boss stores their t-eng is transparent and glows bright orange. Destroying those body parts are the keys to taking the boss down quickly.
Lost Planet also speaks! The character and narrator voices are great and sound authentic. The rest of the music for Lost Planet is virtually non-existant. The background music is not interesting enough to comment on, but the sound effects are really great. The mechanical squeaking the VS makes when walking is great, as are the sounds of gunfire. Explosions sound cool and the far away sound of oncoming boulders is enough to urge Wayne out of the direct path. It is all the little things in this game that make it great.
