Lost Planet demo

    Recently Lost Planet demo came out on Xbox Live. I saw it at E3 in Capcom's booth and was intrigued by the snow/weather effects, but I only saw it for a minute at the show.

    Now that I got to play the demo, I must admit I'm a little dissapointed. I still think it has potential, but so far the demo hasn't blown me away. The idea of this snow barren wasteland planet is mega cool, but there were a few things about the demo that irked me.

    1. Controls are a bit wonky. I don't like how you turn your torso 30 degrees before you turn for real. I guess it just takes getting used to and with the auto aim it doesn't make it that hard. With that the shoulder buttons are snap-turn 90 degrees left or right. I hardly used, ye, shoulder buttons.

    2. Footprints don't stay in the snow. They fade out after a few minutes. Would be really cool to have to track an ememy by its footprints, or have to find a way to elude enemies hunting you by cleverly not leaving tracks or something. Maybe that is in the full game but not in the demo.

    3. Those crawly bug monsters were pretty lame and easy to kill. Concept of them was very Starship Troopers.

    4. Were there any physics in the game? I really don't remember. I'd love to see physics based gameplay tied in with the snowy ambience et all. Would be cool if snow could "pile up" or build up against structures over the course of a level, but that may be a little tedious to implement. In general I'd love to see more with the snow effects. Again, it's just a demo but...

    This makes me want to see the next Splinter Cell game with what appeared to be an interesting Arctic level I recall from E3. Of course, when they were demoing on the show floor there was this repeating bug that forced them to reboot. LoL! gg Ubisoft! Seriously, I still want to play that game.

    Thoughts?

    I really enjoyed the demo personally. As you say, there are a lot of things it could improve upon, especially the rather awkward controls, but the game isn't due out for quite some time and so given how early the demo was released (perhaps that was the most standout thing about the demo!), I was mighty impressed. The graphics are great (particularly those jaw=droppingly beautiful explosions!), and the style and setting sat nicely with me. I'm just happy to see some original action game IP on the 360 really - don't you just love Capcom?

    I absolutely loved this game from the demo, and it's right at the top of the 360 games I'm looking forward to.

    Controls felt a little weird to me at first, too, but I got used to it really quick and ended up really liking them. Things felt pretty natural after a while and I actually enjoyed the dead zone in place of the entire screen spinning around at my every move. Shoulder buttons definitely sped things up when I noticed them.

    One thing I really underutilized in the demo was the grapple... I remember really liking it once I figured out it was there, but by that point I didn't have much left to do. Grapple's no unique or original feature, but their implementation feels really solid.

    And how freakin' cool is it to take the gatling gun off a mech and lug it around? the animation and weight on that felt really powerful when you lugged it around on foot. Not to mention the coolness factor of mixing and matching weapons on the mechs.

    Is it that wrong that the lower-tier bugs are tough to kill? So much of the game is centered around the cold mechanic that you need plenty of fodder to keep yourself alive. I thought that was a fun element, getting the kills to drop the warm goo or whatever I never ran dangerously low or anything but still found myself getting antsy if I hadn't seen an enemy or one of those radius-warming things for a little while. It seems like it'd be so easy for a mechanic like that to feel cheap or just flat-out suck, but I thought it actually worked quite well here.

    And by far the prettiest game I've played on the 360. And I've played a lot of them.

    Tried the demo again...actually I like it more this time, thought the only time to play it is late late at night after a 16 hour day of work so the sound is way down so I haven't listed to the audio much yet.

    I think it still has issues, but I'm liking it more...

    I really, really enjoyed the demo. Way up on my list of 360 titles. I found the controls quite comfortable, the look and feel are really spot on IMO. It really just felt quite well polished and tuned. I was impressed how long the demo was too, Capcom put a fairly generous amount of content out there.

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