Lost Planet 2: the future of squad shooting?

Lost Planet 2′s Westernised run-and-gun rudiments and attritional, control-point-and-respawn-counter structure are the baseline from which Capcom stretches out to more adventurous and (unfailingly) spectacular set-pieces. The pressure-cooker tussle for the drillzone is just a taster: later in the chapter, the squad finds itself tricked into confronting a vast, fire-spewing caterpillar Akrid, one of the T-ENG-producing biological monstrosities that are the jewels in the game’s motion-blur-slathered graphical crown.

Big = easier to hit, as King Kong could tell you.

The Akrid has chomped down a fair few allied troops prior to your arrival, and the huge, marshy crater it calls home is littered with dropped guns and part-trashed VS Suits. It’s a sandbox of epic proportions, in other words, and the first playthrough is accordingly less a matter of beating the boss as rummaging through the options available, peering into watery tunnels and scaling rock outcrops.

The VS Suits, which come in several shapes and sizes, are like thuggish walking jigsaw puzzles: their arm weapons can be detached and reattached, transferred to other Suits or wielded on foot, Master-Chief-style. Some have flight boosters, some can be ridden by more than one player at once, all need a bit of button-mash-administered TLC between spells in the fray.

The caterpillar Akrid, ploughing its way wrathfully from one end of the arena to the other, can be taken down in a number of ways. You might hook-shot yourself right onto the bugger and toss sticky grenades at its glowing dorsal spines, retreat to one of the aforementioned summits and get busy with a scoped rifle, Gatling-spam its legs off at the wheel of a VS Suit, or even stun the beast, crawl into its mouth and pepper-spray its guts before sliding out the other end, presumably in need of some serious post-traumatic therapy.

If this splattery brew of options is a highlight, it doesn’t follow that non-boss chapters are mere connective tissue. Each scenario has its particular rules of engagement, its dynamics and hazards – from the comparatively understated, such as a choice of routes through or around enemy detachments, to the bombastic, such as a nerve-jumping firefight across a series of giant conveyor belts amid the thunder of hydraulic crushers.

The panoramic, somewhat personality-less narrative, whose several factions sport gangsta face scarves that conveniently obviate the need for lip-synch, reinforces the sense that each chapter is to be enjoyed in and by itself, rather than as links in a chain, replayed at tougher difficulties to eke out the subtleties and haul in shinier clearance grades. In this regard Lost Planet 2 betrays the influence of its stablemates, the Monster Hunter games, with their fertile, partitioned hunting grounds, and also of the setpiece-heavy Resident Evil 5.

Capcom's MT Framework takes to motion blur like adolescent boys take to pornography.

The second episode packs some heavy-duty japes, with battalions of enemy VSs and another organic colossus to flatten, but the third episode really takes things up a notch, kicking off aboard a speeding desert cargo train. A tunnelling Akrid erupts from the sand to the rear and starts to devour the train car by car, and you must stall it while your comrades warm up the helicopters. Firepower being scarce, your best bet is often to loose a stack of combustible oil drums into the creature’s maw – just make sure you shoot out the right restraining clamp, and make sure nobody’s standing on the stack when you do so.