Lost Planet: Extreme Condition – RePlay English Review

       The news that Lost Planet will be ported on the PC hit me like a summer heat wave after you’ve stayed all day with the air conditioning on. I simply could not understand (and still don’t) why the producers chose to port the game. Lost Planet had already been launched on the Xbox 360, a gaming system which had a robust and proven multiplayer system behind it – Xbox Live. To port such a game on the PC meant that the designers had to include something to make it appealing to the PC crowd. Simple, right?
       Thus, DirectX 10 support became the scape goat for the marketing boys and girls at Capcom. Now, considering that every console launch has at least a couple of games which are worth buying right off the bat, no questions asked, one has to wonder what the hell did we get when Windows Vista launched? At the time of release, nVidia didn’t even had drivers that worked correctly for the DX10 compatible boards (the GeForce 8 series), drivers which only appeared some months after Vista’s launch. Kind of a moot point to have a DX10 is the video driver can’t even detect your widescreen monitor, no?

       Unfortunately, the game is a massive let-down. Let me start with the hottest feature… er, strike that, what should have been the hottest feature of the game – the multiplayer mode. Because even though it exists, for all intents and purposes, it’s dead. Every time I tried to play Lost Planet online, the server search function only found one, maybe two servers, out of which one was sporadically populated. The first time around I didn’t find any server at all and I started to wonder if it was a firewall or router problem on my end. After doing all the necessary checks and restarting the router the end result was the same.
       Then I took a look at the time. It was 3AM, so I though that maybe everyone who bought the game was asleep. Oh well. Finally, I did manage to find a Team Elimination server, but to my disappointment, the guys who were playing on it were more interested in testing the Vital Suits than actually playing the game. So I can’t help but wonder: who in the world would shell out 40 USD/Euros for a 7.5GB single-player? With this question in mind, I tackled the single-player campaign.